Towards A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Junior High School Geography Textbooks

The tendency of multimodality appears along with the technological advancement.In the fields like daily communication,education and media,verbal texts no longer stand in the dominant place.Meaning making resources like visual images,and sounds are widely adopted to make up this multimodal society,which are followed by the establishment of multimodal discourse analysis.It studies how different semiotic resources interplay with each other and construe meaning together.This thesis tries to investigate four junior high school geography textbooks published by People’s Education Press from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis in order to reveal its own unique characteristics when it comes to the visual design to fulfill the representational,the interactive and the compositional functions along with the verbal texts for the purpose of gaining a better understanding of the pedagogic functions of visual semiotic.The theoretical framework is established on the basis of Functional Linguistics and Visual Grammar.It is hoped that the result of the study could enrich the application of Multimodal Discourse Analysis in the field of education so as to put forward several teaching implications both for teachers and students from the point of view of MDA.After the investigation into the visual system in geography textbooks,conclusions are drawn as follows.Firstly,visual representations tend to portray the specialized geographical knowledge as being close to students’ commonsense experience.Secondly,the content projected by images creates a sense of imposition for students to get actively involved in the pedagogic process.Thirdly,the corresponding expressive codes are featured by moderate formality with the combination of the elaboration and abstraction.The analysis of the multimodal features of the geography textbooks provides fresh insight for studies on textbooks both from pedagogic and semiotic perspectives.Practical pedagogic implications are put forward concerning the textbook designers,teachers and students.