Multimodal theory, short for multimodal discourse analysis theory, has drawn so many scholars’ attraction recent years。 Multimodal discourse theory refers to people use their auditory sense, vision sense and tactile sense to communicate with each other by more than one kind of ways such as language, pictures and actions（Zhang, 2009）When people communicate with each other, they not only use just one way。 Often, a variety of ways (modes) are mixed up together at the same time to achieve the meaning expressing。 “Single mode discourse” refers to the case where only one way is involved in communication; whereas “multimodal discourse” means that various ways are included in communication。 (Machin, 2007) 

2。1。3 Development of Multimodal Theory

Barthes was the first to pay his attention to multimodal discourse analysis。 The Figure of Speech, published by him in 1977 discussed the relationship between the image and language in expressing meanings。 Later on, there were following scholars abroad turned their eyes to this area:文献综述

In 1996, Kress and Leeuwen published Reading Images。 From the angle of visual grammar on the basis of plenty of texts which contained media material, visual arts, scientific researches in the form of maps and charts。 It is an important research because it is the first time that the book presents the visual grammar of the image。 

Later on, Royce (1998) started to study the complementarity of various modes in discourse, and the coordination among modes in language teaching classroom。 In 2001, Unsworth tackled the problem of electronic format of images appearing in the modern teaching。 In the information era, this research made multimedia teaching become much handier。

Charles and Kaltenbacher (2007) dealt with the methods of multimodal discourse analysis and extended these methods into other fields, such as mathematics, entertainment, architectural design, education, medicine and etc。 Three years later, Machin’s Introduction to Multimodal Analysis concluded the multimodal theory systematically (Machin, 2007)。

Compared with the rapid development of multimodal theory abroad, the development at home is much later。 Here are the important phrases of this period:

Li was the first person who introduced multimodal discourse analysis into China。 In his book Multimodal Discourse Analysis on Social Symbols, he analyzed the meaning of multimodal theory applied to teaching。 Then, Zhu (2007) provided a theoretical basis and analytical method foe multimodal discourse analysis from the perspective of systematic functional linguistics。 At the same year, Hu (2007) mainly talked about that PPT had become a tool of information transmission in modern classroom in modern language teaching classroom in his article。 Later on, Zhang (2009; 2010) actually published a series of studies on the application of multimodal theory to foreign language classroom teaching and the theoretical framework of multimodal theory。 In addition, he also designed lots of methods of multimodal language teaching。

Apart from what I have mentioned above, there are still many scholars especially a group of postgraduate students have researched the application of this theory by an empirical case study in the school, through collecting and analyzing the research data by setting an experimental group and a controlled group in the school。