The Analysis Of Images And Texts In The Junior High School Textbook

National Curriculum Standard for English(2017)clearly suggests that teachers and textbook writers pay attention to cover different modes of discourses in the language classroom since the language teaching text is usually presented in multi-modal forms in reality.Students’ understanding of the meaning and beauty of multi-modal discourse is accomplished through teaching discourses.As the core approach of language learning,textbooks is an important basis for teachers to guide students to understand and analyze multi-modal discourses.However,in the process of using the teaching materials,compared with the textual discourses,teachers pay less attention to multimodal discourses.Even if teachers can realize the importance of multi-modal discourses,they still fail to achieve systematic and reasonable understandings.There exits an official guidance,however,which fails to explain clearly on how to teach multi-modal discourses.In order to have a deeper and more systematic understanding of the connotation embedded in the multi-modal discourses,and to discover its support to the discourse meaning,topic and function of the whole unit,and learn on how to construct the meaning together with the texts,this study explores the outstanding features of a certain textbook widely used in China,based on Visual Grammar by Kress &van Leeuwen(1996,2006).And the study endeavors to supplement the teacher’s previously empirical and partial interpretation of the pictures,by finding a relatively scientific and systematic tool,applying the framework into the combination of pictures and the textual discourses.This study takes Visual Grammar Theory which is put forward by Kress and van Leeuwen as the theoretical analysis framework.A total of 58 images from Activity 1a are taken as subjects.Classification and collecting statistics,analysis,are conducted then.Descriptions of the overall trend and the relationship between language and pictures will be presented.During this process,the study tries to combine the findings with the theme topic,language function,and language structures and how they cooperate to bring out the meaning of the unit.The study found that the meaning of 1a images is closely related to students’ cognitive levels and complements the goal of language learning.Based on these,the final conclusion of this study is to reveal the underlying meaning of the pictures and then suggest that teachers pay more attention to multi-modal discourses,help learners to appropriate and comprehend the value as well as the functions of images.And teachers can use images flexibly and effectively,and carry out effective language teaching abiding by the requirements by the National Curriculum Standard.