A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Documentary Film Chinese School

As the science and technology rapidly develop, multimedia has headed into a new era where people greatly rely on different means of multimedia to gain information they want. In this situation, monomodal text cannot fully satisfy people’s need and language is no longer the only way that constructs meaning. Various social semiotic resources, such as sound, image, and even three dimensional object, can work together to form multimodal discourse, which plays a more and more important role in people’s daily life.Documentary film, characterized by its unique features, is popular with the audience and has become a way for recreation and acquiring knowledge. At the same time, more and more scholars begin to show their deep concern with documentary films. It is observed that the researches on documentary films are mostly conducted in three aspects, culture and customs, narratology and aesthetics, neglecting the meaning resources such as sound, image, color, etc. Few researches were done from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis. Due to its prominent characteristics of multimodality, it is necessary and feasible to conduct a thorough analysis of the documentary film. This thesis will take the documentary film as a visual discourse to discuss how producers express the meanings by shots. At the same time, it will analyze dynamic images from the perspective of linguistics, interpreting the selected images and discussing how they construct meanings. Specifically, this thesis adopts a qualitative research method combined with the film segmentation method to analyze the documentary film Chinese School produced by BBC under the framework of Kress and van Leewen’s Visual Grammar from three perspectives, namely, representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning. By focusing on different aspects of Chinese education shown in this documentary film, this thesis unveils the producers’ intentions by studying the processing of vector, information value contact, etc., and further identifies the Chinese education in foreign producers’ eyes.This thesis is of some significance and value. For one aspect, it testifies the explanatory power of Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar on documentary film. After the analysis of Chinese School, this thesis found out the way foreign producers express their ideas on Chinese education and proved that visual discourse has the equal importance to the language in expressing meaning. For another aspect, this thesis expands the applicability of Visual Grammar, testifies its feasibility and herein promotes the study of social semiotics.