A Study On The Effective Use Of The Illustrations In English Textbooks For Junior High School Students

The illustration is an organic part of the English textbooks used by the primary and middle school students in China,and it is often called the second language of the textbook.Textbook editors have put the illustrations in a very important position of the textbooks.Many studies have proved that the illustrations in the textbooks can train the students to be observant,stimulate the students to learning with great interest,and improve the efficiency of teaching and learning ultimately.Therefore,how to make use of the textbook illustrations to organize teaching and learning is of great significance.This thesis studies the illustrations in the middle school English textbooks Go for It published by the People’s Education Press(PEP),and analyzes the application of middle school English textbook illustrations,trying to put forward strategies for the effective application of the textbook illustrations.First,this thesis makes a statistical analysis of the illustrations in the 5 textbooks for junior high schools published by PEP.The result shows that the illustrations account for a significant proportion of all the middle school English textbook in terms of the information the textbook tries to convey,with almost two illustrations per page on average.Second,this thesis explores the characteristics and functions of the English textbook illustrations by referring to Multimodal Discourse Analysis,Dual Coding Theory and Visual learning theory.Then,the author of this paper conducts a survey by questionnaires to get information about the teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards the illustrations and how they use the illustrations in teaching and learning.The investigation results reflect that all the teachers and students are basically satisfied with the illustrations.However,the illustrations are rarely used in their everyday teaching and learning.Finally,the author selects two junior high school classes in Yanggu Experimental Middle School of Shandong Province as the subjects to conduct a one-semester experimental teaching.Taking the first-grade English textbook as an example,the study focuses on the effectiveness of using textbook illustrations in teaching and learning of English vocabulary and sentence patterns,as well as reading and writing in junior high school.This research finds that actively using illustrations to facilitate English teaching in junior high school is helpful to motivate the students to learn English actively,to help the students to memorize English language knowledge effectively,to improve their English reading and writing ability significantly and to cultivate their cultural awareness.Therefore,the teachers and students should pay enough attention to the illustrations in the textbooks,understand the characteristics and function of illustrations,and effectively use them in English teaching and learning.To address the different sides of English teaching in junior high school,this paper also tries to put forward suggestions on how to effectively use the textbook illustrations in teaching practice to improve the teaching and learning effect.