| With the rapid development of information technology in the multimedia era, textbooks used in the field ofeducation have undergone profound changes. A variety of semiotic resources are applied in textbook discourses,so that the textbooks appear increasing multimodal characteristics. How to understand multimodal resources intextbooks thoroughly, how multimodal resources co-construct meanings in textbook discourses and how todevelop students’ multiliteracies by making full use of multimodal resources in textbooks are the issues faced byscholars from the area of education.In China, a junior high school sets one of the important stages for students learning English. On the onehand, the junior high school is concerned about how to consolidate the achievement of primary English teachingand improve it; On the other hand, it relates to how to lay a solid foundation for the senior English teaching. Andreading is a vital component of English teaching and learning. It is always carrying the burden of presenting andexpanding the target languages, therefore, the success or failure of the teaching reading is closely related to thatof the whole English teaching.Based on what have been mentioned above, the author proposed the framework of multimodality-baseddiscourse analysis of textbooks for the present study according to Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammarand Martine and Salway’s framework of image-text Relations. The materials in the thesis, junior Englishtextbooks Go for it consisting of five books were published for the first time by People’s Education Press in2001. The present study focused on the reading parts which have145texts and138images are enough toconduct the study. The multimodal discourse analysis of these textbooks has been made from three perspectives:Status of images and text, Logico-semantic relations of images and text, and how these visual images constructmeta-functional meanings，so as to help students and teachers deeply understand the role of multimodalresources in meaning construction, teach and learn English by putting these resources in textbooks to good use.The results show that images and texts interact with each other and co-construct multimodal discoursemeanings. The status of image subordinates to text accounts for the majority of the total, which indicates thetextbook editors emphasize that the status of the text is more important than that of image. These images mainlyplay an auxiliary role in the meaning construction. Among the logico-semantic relations between images andtext, the text-more-general relation occupies a dominant percentage of all images in the five textbooks. Animage realizes more specific meaning than that of the corresponding text does. As for meta-functional meanings,the result indicates that a considerably outstanding frequency of interactive meaning is realized in Go for it, which occupies more than half, especially equality is the most frequently interactive meaning. This reflects theequal status between the represented participants and students, which is suitable for interactive learning. Inaddition, multimodal discourses exert a positive influence on junior English teaching. And better teachingresults can be achieved by fully using visual images in textbooks.The study on junior English textbooks Go for it is meaningful for junior English teaching. And the resultsof the present study are significant for both the development of students’ multiliteracies and textbook design. |
