A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Senior High School English Textbooks(2019,PEP)from The Perspective Of Intersemiotic Complementarity

In the era of network and multimedia,people receive and transmit much information through various channels every day.At the same time,the information and knowledge are transmitted through multiple modes,such as text,image,sound and video.In school teaching,teaching materials are the carrier and transmission tool of knowledge,playing an essential role in teaching activities.Textbooks are the primary materials for teachers to design and carry out teaching,and they are also important sources for students to acquire knowledge.The textbooks used today contains not only texts but also include abundant modal resources,such as colors,images,audio,video.These modal resources are also symbolic resources for transmitting information,which can assist learning.The Senior High School English Textbooks published by the People’s Education Press in 2019 reflect the spirit of English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017)and carefully revised based on the previous used textbooks.The textbooks have rich modal resources.It is important for teachers and students to understand the multimodal characteristics of new textbooks,identify various modal resources and make effective use of various modes.Besides,most textbook research focuses on previously used textbooks,and most of them are conducted from the perspective of visual grammar.Therefore,this study hopes to use another research perspective,namely,Royce’s intersemiotic complementarity,to carry out a multimodal discourse analysis of the Senior High School English textbooks(2019,PEP).Three textbooks for compulsory learning are selected as the research corpus.In this research,Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics and Royce’s intersemiotic complementarity are used to be theoretical basis to conduct a multimodal discourse analysis of the textbooks.The research aims to explore the distribution of image modes in this set of textbooks and the semantic intersemiotic relations between images and texts in the reading parts of the textbooks.Simultaneously,in order to understand the senior high school students’ perception and utilization of the modal resources,this study also designs a questionnaire to explore the students’ multiliteracies.This study first distributes questionnaires in one senior high school in Kunming,collects 212 valid questionnaires,and then obtains corresponding research data.Secondly,the image mode resources in the new textbooks are classified and recorded.Finally,this study analyzes the relations between images and texts in the reading parts of the textbooks from the perspective of the ideational feature of Royce’s intersemiotic complementarity.The following conclusions are obtained through analysis and research:Firstly,senior high school students have certain multiliteracies in terms of the modal resources in the set of textbooks.Specifically,most students can identify the modal resources,especially the image resources.Simultaneously,they are aware of the role of image modal resources and believe that these resources can improve their interest in English learning.Moreover,they also realize a close connection between images and texts,which is beneficial to their English learning.However,most students’ understanding of multimodal resources is still in the "conscious" stage,and they are still unable to make full and effective use of them.Secondly,the new textbooks contain a wealth of image resources.There are a total of 358 images.Among the various images,the number of photos is the greatest,followed by cartoons and posters,and the number of maps is the smallest.As for the different sections in the textbooks,the reading section is the one that contains the most picture resources,with a total of 102 pictures,accounting for one-third of the total image modal resources.Among them,70 images are all photos,showing that photos are the main form of image mode resources in this set of textbooks.Thirdly,five semantic relations between the images and texts are identified in the reading parts,namely,“repetition,” “synonymy,” “meronymy,” “hyponymy,” and“collocation.” These five semantic relations complement the images and texts and construct and convey information,helping students better understand the texts.The results of this study also provide some pedagogical implications.For textbook editors,when compiling textbooks,especially arranging images and texts,they should consider the semantic intersemiotic complementarity between texts and images.Moreover,they need to make reasonable use of various modal resources and their collocation effects to improve the quality of textbooks.For teachers and students,it is necessary to actively and deeply understand the roles of various modal resources in the teaching process.Furthermore,students should consciously use the various modal resources in the textbook to learn English and improve English learning effectiveness;teachers need to actively guide students to explore the semantic relations between the image modes and text modes,and to cultivate students’ multiliteracies.