A Study On The Development Of Primary School English Textbooks From The Perspective Of Multimodality

Multimodal discourse analysis(hereafter MDA)is a historical approach in the development of discourse analysis.Kress & van Leeuwen(2001)expound that “the concept of Multimodal Discourse comprises representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning”(p.73-177).Besides,the Multimodal Discourse broadens the meta-functional thought of systemic functional linguistics to visual mode.This thesis combines the qualitative approach with the quantitative approach.At first,based on Jones(2006)’ multimodal content analysis(hereafter MCA)and Kress & van Leeuwen(2001)’s MDA,the author makes a quantitative analysis of the modal types in the textbook.Then,the qualitative analysis concerns the exploration of how these modalities build textual meanings in the specific context.Finally,the paper uncovers research findings by data and statistics.The data in this paper are mainly collected from the 2003 and the 2012 Primary School English textbooks published by People’s Education Press(hereafter PEP).This thesis randomly chooses two units from each book to form 30 units,and each of which comprises 15 units from each edition.The results of this study reveal that the visuals in the 2003 textbook are made up of small visual blocks while the 2012 textbook pays more attention to the completeness of visuals.Besides,the number of photo collage and cartoons in the 2003 textbook is greater than that of the 2012 textbook.Generally speaking,the 2003 textbook more emphasizes interpersonal meanings.In contrast,the 2012 textbook mainly employs experiential meanings.Then,the locations on top center and bottom center in the 2003 textbook occur far more frequently than the 2012 textbook.Conversely,locations on from top to bottom through center in 2012 textbook are absolutely dominant.Secondly,the 2003 textbook involves more highlighting devices in the running text,such as italics,bold,color,or capitalization,underlines whereas the 2012 textbook features more summary,Q&A or headings & subheadings.In terms of the design style,the 2012 textbook is a genuine representation of our life instead of using some cartoons to mimic life.Thus,the 2012 textbook shortens the distance between image participants and image viewers,as well as creates genuine situations for English learning.Thirdly,the categories of images in the 2003 textbook are not as diversified as in the 2012 textbook.In addition,the 2003 textbook is depicted in a comic style.By contrast,the 2012 textbook consists of some photo collage.As one can see,the 2003 textbook mainly presents the text in the form of dialogue,with the key words in bold to reflect salience.Conversely,the 2012 textbook takes advantage of key phrases to reflect salience.Additionally,the 2012 textbook presents a closer social distance between the reader and the image participant than the 2003 textbook.