A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Senior High School English Textbooks Advance With English

In this age of multimedia, paper textbooks in current use in educational institutionsare changing in a profound way. Layout structure and visual images of modern textbookspresent evident multimodality and play significant role in meaning making. However, mostresearches on textbook discourse are monomodal analysis, which focuses on thecharacteristics and functions of certain modes of semiosis and ignores the interactions ofvarious meaning-making resources. Such studies can not make an insightful understandingof multimodal discourses. Hence, it is necessary to explore textbook multimodality andunderstand what these changes mean for being literate in this new landscape of the21stcentury.Multimodal discourse analysis is a new approach to discourse analysis based on thesemiotic theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics. It integrates language and othersemiotic resources, such as visual images, music, color, etc., to construct meanings.Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to make studies on textbooks from new perspectives.The present paper adopts a systemic functional semiotic perspective proposed by Kress andvan Leeuwen in outlining a rang of the meaning-making resources in English textbooks,and making a description of the multimodality of the textbooks. Then the interrelationshipin meaning-making between the text and image is studied based on Royce’s Framework ofIntersemiotic Complementarity. The present study has been made from two aspects, first,the multimodality of the senior high school English textbooks Advance with English isresearched from layout structures and modality of visual images; second, the ideational andinterpersonal intersemiotic complementarities are analyzed. The results show that (1)textbooks Advance with English are rich in background colors, fonts and joint-constructeddiscourses. The lively layout and visual images can facilitate literacy learning amongEnglish learners and stimulate their interest in participation in learning practice;(2) theimage modality has close relationships with social cultural contexts and recognition ofparties in communication;(3) the text and image in multimodal resources coexist inconstructing meaning-making, while the visual image repeat the content of text more intuitively.The results of the present study are significant for both the development ofmultiliteracies and textbook design. The study on English textbooks Advance with Englishis also meaningful for the senior high school English teaching.