A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of New Horizon College English Reading&Writing

Multimodality, a new term for describing the way of obtaining outside world information, refers to the nature of living things perceiving the external world through seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling and other senses. It mainly refers to the diversity of communicative symbols in oral or written communication. The so-called Multimodal Discourse refers to a communicating phenomenon that discourse expression is not only confined to the language itself, but the language itself is put in the background of multimodal forms such as images, sound, colors, animations and so on to construct the discourse content. Multimodal Discourse Analysis（MDA） is the process of analyzing discourse, which is adopted to analyze the different symbol modes of a variety of communications, the relationship among the various modes, and the overall meaning constituted by the various modes. Multimodal Discourse Analysis theory emerged in the western linguistics field in the1990’s, which developed on the basis of Discourse Analysis theory. Compared with the single-modal expression, which is only through visual symbols（words） to express the meaning, multimodal expressions have obvious richness and effectiveness in expressing meanings.Nowadays, there exists an obvious contradiction between the multimodal compiling tendency of college English textbooks and the lack of multimodal consciousness for college English teachers in teaching and for college students who are actually quite indifferent to multimodal-literacy. The reason for the contradiction is that a great number of teachers and students are not quite familiar with the multimodal discourse theory and its practical applications to textbook compiling.New Horizon College English（NHCE）textbook series were published in 2001, which were popular among most of the colleges. The second and the third Editions of the same series were published in 2008 and 2015 respectively. Compared with the 1^st Edition, the 2^nd and the 3^rd Editions of NHCE textbooks have huge changes in many aspects. Except for the layout and the content of the textbooks, the choice of the book cover images, the application of background colors, the selection of theme pictures, the usage of marginal images and the background images, etc. all changed greatly. All of these compiling features manifest the compiling tendency of multimodality on the textbook editing. Nevertheless, in many colleges, in which NHCE series are used as textbooks, there are phenomena that the most valuable teaching materials and resources, especially the multimodal teaching materials and resources are neglected and wasted.In order to solve the contradiction and to make the most of the valuable textbook resources, it is very necessary to conduct a comprehensive and detailed multimodal discourse analysis on the classical college English textbooks.Based on Visual Grammar, Image-text Relations and Multimodal Literacy theories, this study tries to compare the 1^st, the 2^nd and the 3^rd editions of this set of English textbooks, NHCE（Reading and Writing Book I—IV）, from the perspective of the multimodal compiling to detect the editing tendency and its implications on practical College English teaching and learning. The study shows that more pictures and images are used in the 2^nd and 3^rd editions than the 1^st one. There are only 40 images used in the 1^st edition, one image only in each unit, in the 2^nd edition there are totally 397 images used, 9.4 images in each unit, and in the 3^rd edition 348 images are used in the total 32 units, almost 11 images each unit on average. The image application is the most obvious features for the newer editions.The process of multimodal discourse analysis of this set of College English textbooks will help the college English teachers to understand the teaching materials more comprehensively and to improve their awareness on multimodal discourse analysis and multimodal teaching, and it will also help the students to strengthen their consciousness of multimodal-literacy in foreign language learning. Both teachers and students will deepen their understanding of the teaching materials, which will promote college English teaching and learning more efficiently.