An Overview of Research on Multimodal Teaching and Learning

With the development of modern information technology, there emerges an increasing trend of multimodal teaching and learning. Teachers are required to employ a wide range of materials such as textbooks, diagrams, photographs and drawings to facilitate students’ learning. Thus, the significance of applying multimodal textbook discourse into classroom setting is also becoming increasingly pronounced. This article takes a retrospective look at the related previous studies on multimodal teaching and learning, which cover a wide variety of perspectives, including the multimodal discourse analysis, the multimodal classroom teaching and the multimodal textbook analysis. Based on the literature review, the deficiencies of current multimodal studies and suggestions for further research have been proposed in the last part of the article. The current study can give important enlightenment to the research and practice of multimodal teaching and learning, especially with the aid of the multimodal textbook discourse analysis.