Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Senior High School English Textbooks

During the present postmodern period, discourse is not only expressed in text mode, butalso in pictures, sounds, animations, layouts, colors, charts and other kinds of modes at thesame time. It is necessary to study the multimodality of discourse in social practice.English textbooks are the very learning resources and tools to achieve the teaching goaland efficiency in High School English classrooms. With the development of multimediatechnology, the types and contents of the English textbooks have undergone earth-shakingchanges. In the English textbooks, there are no longer single texts, but also pictures, video,music, PPT, etc. This paper selects the Reading part (each unit one piece, a total of55) of thenew curriculum standard of senior high school English textbooks (trial version, required andselective, a total of11books), published by People’s Education Press, as the research subject.From the perspective of systematic functional grammar and Kress and Leeuwen’s visualgrammar, this paper tries to seek the multimodal of image, layout, font and color within thebooks, and explore the language metafunctions and potential meanings within these modes,and finally put forward feasible teaching advice.After analysis, the paper finds that all the modes coordinate with each other to conveyvarious information and rich meaning. Firstly, in the11textbooks, there are125pictures,among which there are45in the required version, and80in the elective version. Apparently,there are more pictures in the elective textbooks than the required textbooks. This is mainlydue to the continuous increasing difficulty and abstractness of the contents of the textbooks,which should involve a kind of intuitive social symbol or pictures to help readers understandthe content of the text. As a whole, most of the images in the textbook are the narrativeimages, all of which belong to the action and reaction process, which suggests that theseimages are used to express some kinds of interpersonal actions or communications. Otherimages in the textbooks belong to symbolic process of conceptual image, which mainlyconvey the same as or similar things as the participants presented in the images. Secondly, thelayout and the modes of elective textbooks are richer and more complicated while the layoutmodes and their collocation are relatively single in the required textbooks, mainly words andpictures. From the perspective of information value, it can be seen that words occupy themain position of the page while pictures are around these words so as to better convey theinformation. From the perspective of salience, words occupy the most part of the layout. Thefont is black and the background is white or light in order to distinct them. Obviously, thewriter tries to highlight the text and make them in a prominent position. Seen from the textframeworks and images, the mode relationships of the all55texts are mainly separation,segregation and integration. Thirdly, a variety of colors are used in the textbooks. Black isgenerally used in the main body which means more formal. In order to distinct the main body and the titles, the titles are painted with different colors. Also different kinds of images areused in the55texts, including photos, drawings, maps, flow charts, tables, and graphs. So dothe colors. The degrees of color modulation and differentiation are high but the degrees ofpurity are low, which can effectively stimulate the readers’ attention and make them clearlydistinguish each element of the images.When Chinese English teachers use such textbooks full of different social symbols, theyhad better adopt various teaching methods, for example, multi-level reading methods, to trainstudents’ critical thinking. At the same time, teachers may give students related topics and askthem to make and present their PPTs. And teachers can design writing topics with multimediaand the network, and ask students to write given composition. And also teachers should createtrue contexts to help students do intercultural communication. The last but not least, theconsciousness to cultivate students’ multi-literacy should be established in order to trainstudents’ multimodal discourse analysis ability.