A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Design Of Textbooks

With the rapid development and application of new mass media and computer technology, discourses of the new media age show diversified forms, so more and more semiotic resources take part in the meaning-making, and form multimodal discourses. Multimodal Discourse Analysis (Hereafter MDA) as a branch of applied linguistics came into being in1990s. It refers to a study of interrelationship and interdependence between different communicative modes in meaning-making. Today, multimodal discourse is pervasive, and it is an essential skill to understand multimodal discourses in daily communicative activities.Since they are an important carrier for conveyance of knowledge and culture, the textbooks without doubt should be designed to cultivate the afore-mentioned skill and provide necessary resources. Researchers start to compile multimodal textbooks, so more and more textbooks display certain multimodal features, and the design of teaching materials is progressing toward the3-D stage. How to evaluate a textbook is designed for this skill? Obviously it is sensible and imperative to do MDA on the textbooks, because MDA is widely applied in linguistic study, and also a successful teaching method. By MDA of teaching materials, it provides the textbook designer with feedbacks, strengthens learner’s awareness of multimodal discourse and improves their multiliteracies.This thesis, mainly based on the theory of Visual Grammar and image-text relation framework, puts forward a research framework to analyze the text and the image that work together to construct meaning, and breaks through the limitation of separately study text and image. By making MDA of the textbooks---Experiencing English Viewing, Listening and Speaking, this thesis analyzes the features of text, the meanings of image, and the relationship between them, thus verifies the proposed framework.This thesis tries to seek answers for the following questions:(1) How to realize the three metafunctions of images in multimodal teaching materials?(2) What is(are) the relationship(s) between images and texts in teaching materials? How do they cooperate to construct the meaning?The results of this study reveal that this series of textbooks is typical example of multimodal texts and fully realizes the features of the text and the three meta-functions of the image. The designers of the textbook have applied several modes to construct meaning. In terms of the text-image relationship, many images of these textbooks function only as illustrations and supplements to the text, and they are not assigned the leading role in multimodal discourses. Therefore, the proposed framework on analyzing the multimodal discourse is effective, and can be widely used.Based on these analyses, the paper points out several problems for the design and compiling of textbooks, and suggests some pedagogical implications for teaching and compiling teaching materials and cultivating student’s critical multiliteracies.Besides, this paper also has its own limitations, mainly in the absence of audio and video materials.