| With the constantly deepening of educational reform and development,tremendous changes have take place in the contents of textbooks,with increasing remarkable multi-modal characteristics.According to English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(the revised 2017 Edition in 2020),English textbooks are the core of English curriculum resources,and multimodal discourse is widely adopted in English teaching,with the focus on multimodal resources in discourse to cultivate students’ ability to "viewing".New textbooks,published by People’s Education Press and Beijing Normal University Education Press in 2019,have been used in some parts of China since 2021.They include many vivid and wonderful images,and activities related to "viewing".Therefore,it is imperative to study the characteristics and use of the multi-modal textbooks,in order to cultivate students’ multiple literacy and promote English teachers’ understanding and use of the new teaching materials.In response to the multi-modal trend of textbooks,this research takes the above-mentioned six compulsory English textbooks for senior high schools as study object,makes a comparison and analysis of them,and explores their similarities and differences in terms of image-text relationship.The dissertation makes an analysis the meaning of images on the basis of Kress & van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar Theory(1996),and adopts Martinc and Salway’s Image-text Relation Theory(1977)to analyze the interactive relationship between images and texts,to study the meaning construction of images in textbooks and the specific relationship between images and texts,and to deeply analyze the multi-modal characteristics of textbooks.This dissertation addresses the following questions:(1)What is the overall quantity of images in these textbooks?(2)How are the three functional meanings of Visual Grammar embodied in the two sets of textbooks respectively?(3)What are their similarities and differences in the image-text relationship?Through the statistical analysis of the image-text relationship in the two sets of textbooks,this study draws the following conclusions:(1)As far as the overall number of images in the textbooks is concerned,the images are divided into four categories: photos,cartoons,tables and diagrams,and the textbooks of Beijing Normal University include a more variety of images,lightly higher in number than those in the textbooks of People’s Education Edition.In addition,both of them take photos and cartoons as the main expressions of textbook illustrations.Finally,the textbooks of People’s Education Edition contain more tables while the textbooks of Beijing Normal University Edition adopt more diagrams.(2)As far as the construction of representational meaning is concerned,the images of "reaction process" account for a large proportion in the two sets of textbooks,and their "Narrative Presentation" is more than the "Concept Presentation";in the construction of Interactional Meaning,they include more "offer" images than "demand" images,and also adopt the images of "horizontal perspective" and "vertical perspective",but the image of "horizontal perspective" is the most commonly used to realize the Compositional Meaning,the two sets use more images composed from the middle to the edge,with clear frameworks.(3)Through the analysis of the image-text relationship between the two sets of textbooks,it is evident that the image is attached to the text,with more extension relationships than projection relationships,and both sets of textbooks focus on the mutual interaction between the text mode and visual images.Based on the above findings,this study offers relevant suggestions for learners,English teachers’ teaching and textbook compilation for reference,with a view to helping teachers and students to jointly understand the graphic meaning of textbooks and consciously cultivate multiple literacy to meet the needs of society,and to provide a certain factual basis for textbook compilers to design multi-modal textbooks more reasonably. |
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