| With the rapid development of the society, people’s communication means has changed greatly. The dominant mode of writing is now giving way to other modes. Under the revolution of communication means, textbooks have also undergone tremendous changes. One obvious characteristic of most modern textbooks is that they are multimodal.Since the new curriculum innovation in2001, new textbooks have come into use. The subject of comparing the old and new versions is in the ascendant. However, few scholars have done such comparative studies from the perspective of visual grammar, which provides detailed guidelines for doing multimodal discourse analysis. Therefore, this thesis has made a comparative investigation of the two versions of junior English textbooks-Junior English for China(JEFC) and Go for it!(GFI)-from the perspective of visual grammar.Compared with JEFC, there are fewer action processes and more speech and mental processes in GFI, but analytical processes and symbolic processes are nearly the same in the two versions of textbooks. JEFC contains many naturalistic portraits with low modality because of unsaturated colors, whereas GFI contains naturalistic images with high modality mainly because of their saturated colors. Furthermore, GFI has many sensory and abstract-sensory images. The compositional deployment of JEFC is much better than GFI in arousing the students’interest.The exploration of multimodality in textbooks is significant pedagogically in that it can not only ascertain the differences between the two versions but also explore the implications for the compilation of new textbooks in the future. Furthermore, the current research can help teachers and students prepare for the multiliteracies. Teachers should not only guide the students to abstract the knowledge in textbooks, but also instruct them to understand how various semiotics interact to produce a coherent meaning. Students are supposed to examine the internal relations between the visuals and verbal texts so that they can equip themselves with the competence of understanding multimodal discourses. |
