DIGITAL LIBRARY
USING MULTIMODAL TEXTS IN TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES IN TIMES OF CRISIS
1 MGIMO (Moscow State Institute of International Relations) (RUSSIAN FEDERATION)
2 Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences (RUSSIAN FEDERATION)
About this paper:
Appears in: ICERI2020 Proceedings
Publication year: 2020
Pages: 692-695
ISBN: 978-84-09-24232-0
ISSN: 2340-1095
doi: 10.21125/iceri.2020.0214
Conference name: 13th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation
Dates: 9-10 November, 2020
Location: Online Conference
Abstract:
Teaching a foreign language implies forming in students an image of the verbal and non-verbal meaning of a foreign word, which can be solved using multimodal texts. Any verbal message is multimodal as it consists of both linguistic and non-linguistic signs. For example, the text of this article has both verbal (the text itself) and non-verbal (the font, its size, the material medium it is inscribed or printed on etc.) parts.

A multimodal text, like any message containing signs, does not transmit information directly but serves as a program for producing new knowledge based on the existing knowledge of the multimodal text's recipient.

The phenomenology of the multimodal text's perception has the following form: a sensual image of the verbal sign's body, a perception image of the verbal sign's body, which is formed using the memory image of the verbal sign's body used as the perceptual standard; the memory image of the object associated with the image of the verbal sign, i.e. the word meaning; a sensual image of the body of a non-verbal sign (image); the image of the memory of the body of a non-verbal sign as a perceptual standard for identifying a sensory image; the image of the object’s memory associated with the body image of a non-verbal sign as its meaning.

A synonymity between the verbal and non-verbal parts of a multimodal text, improves the study of foreign vocabulary, as it helps to increase the speed and degree of understanding, thus, helping students to keep these lexical units represented as multimodal text in memory.

In addition, the semantic perception of such texts creates the prerequisites for better understanding of not only the verbal meaning of the word described in the form of its vocabulary definition but also the objective meaning in the form of a visual image of the subject indicated by the word.

It is worth saying that the approach based on using multimodal texts for teaching foreign languages is extremely useful as Internet access allows us to reach a lot of data (both verbal and non-verbal, for example, pictures, videos, sounds etc.) that can help students to facilitate word learning and make it more efficient, especially in the current situation, when students are isolated and cannot communicate face to face.
Keywords:
Memory, mental images, vocabulary training, multimodal text, foreign languages.