| Images are everywhere,yet they are not innocent.This is especially true when it comes to the images in a textbook.In addition to being the primary teaching resources for teachers in mainstream classrooms,the primary English textbooks are also crucial visual resources.Story Time in PEP primary English textbooks is a section known for its series of images in which stories are told.This thesis,in light of visual grammar developed by Kress and van Leeuwen,aims to analyze the representational meaning of the 282 images in Story Time in the eight textbooks.The following two research questions are to be specifically explored.1)What are the distributive features of the three components which realize the representational meaning?2)What are the constructive features of the representational meaning in the images?A qualitative and quantitative analysis of the meanings represented in the images leads to the findings as follows.1)The three components of process,participant and setting work together to realize the representational meaning of the images.Firstly,in terms of process,both narrative processes and conceptual processes are distributed in the majority of the images,and they account for 97.87% and 89.36% respectively.The narrative action process,narrative reactional process as well as narrative speech process are mostly represented and they respectively make up a percentage of 96.10,59.57 and 53.90,and the distribution of the narrative speech process goes through comparatively big changes across the textbooks.The conceptual analytical process is depicted the most and accounts for 89.36%.The narrative mental process,narrative conversion process as well as conceptual classificational process and conceptual symbolic process are comparatively less represented,each making up a proportion of 4.26%,0.35%,11.70% and 5.32%.Secondly,as for participants,in addition to the fact that the participants are all depicted cartoonically,most participants are representedindividually and specifically,each reaching up to 99.29% and 97.52%;it is only in the textbooks of Grade 6 that some participants are represented as groups and generically in the images,but each constitute only 0.71% and 2.48%.Thirdly,up to 93.97% of the settings are represented locally,while the other 6.03% are exclusively represented as non-local ones in the textbooks for Grade 6 students.The local settings of family,city and school are depicted the most,respectively making up 31.56%,30.85% and25.18%;the global and regional settings are the mostly represented non-local settings,but each only account for 3.19% and 2.13%.2)As far as the construction of the representational meaning of the images in Story Time is concerned,the images are mostly both narrative and conceptual cartoonic representations depicted within the local settings where the participants are represented individually and specifically;while the narrative processes which imbue the images with dynamic meanings require students to observe the depicted goings-on,the conceptual ones are mainly embedded and provide the narrative patterns with rich circumstantial information where the context of situation is rendered clear and opportunities to probe into the timeless property of the depicted objects are made possible.The participants are predominantly depicted individually and specifically within local settings while in Grade 6 some are represented as groups and generically within non-local settings,which reflects that students in later years of primary schooling are exposed to the learning challenge where they are expected to deduce from the abstract and gain uncommonsensical educational knowledge from their expanding field of experience.It is clear that the different representations are overall in accordance with students' cognitive abilities and knowledge domain in different stages,and they in a sense reflect the principles of being scientific,being interesting and being flexible in the 2011 English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education. |
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