A Comparative Study Of Multimodal Denial Of Chinese Children And Adults From The Perspective Of Systemic Functional Grammar

In 2020,the letter“Reply to Proposal No.4354 of the Third Session of the 13^thNational Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference（CPPCC）”by the Ministry of Education mentioned that the training objective of children’s oral communication is to enhance the effect of oral communication with multimodal resources（Ministry of Education,2020）.As a multimodal act to negate and correct the participant’s opinion,denial is an essential communicative ability to express personal feelings.Hence,this study examines the multimodal denial actions of eight early school-age children（ages6 to 8）and eight adults.Motivated by naturally occurring corpus,the research presents an analytical framework based on Systemic Functional Grammar.On the one hand,this framework focuses on the general characteristics of multimodal representations and their inter-semiotic interactions of denial;on the other hand,it analyzes the transitivity,modality,and cohesion of denial meta-functions and their realizations.The theoretical framework is used in this paper to analyze the similarities and differences between children’s and adults’multimodal denial characteristics in hopes of developing children’s multimodal communicative competence.This paper tries to answer the following questions:1)What are the overall characteristics of multimodal usage and inter-semiotic relationships of multimodal denial of children and adults?2)How can the three meta-functions of children’s and adults’multimodal denial be realized through multimodal usage and inter-semiotic relationships?3)What are the similarities and differences between children’s and adults’multimodal denial acts in dimensions above?The results firstly show that early school-age children and adults tend to use multimodal denial,frequently combining verbal sources with facial expressions,body movements,or gestures.However,the communicative competence for multimodal denial matures with age because adults use multimodal resources more frequently and have a more diversified combination of resources than children.This can also be seen in the realization of meta-functions.In addition to this,the degree of denial tends to moderate with age.For example,although children and adults tend to use the equivalent relationship of multimodal resources to express denial explicitly,adults tend to use mitigating relationships to preserve face,while children tend to use non-verbal resources to complement verbal denial increasing its effect.This tendency persists in modality,children prefer to use denials with the high-modality value than adults.Finally,in the case of processes,children and adults tend to realize denial through the material,relational and existential processes describing the behavior,relation and existence that happened but they less use other other processes that embodied physical or mental activity.Regarding cohesion,children and adults tend to initiate multimodal resources simultaneously to realize denial.By comparing the early school-age children’s and adults’multimodal denial acts,this study hopes to provide important insights into our understanding of the multimodal communicative competence development and children’s language development.The findings suggest that there are some differences in the usage of multimodal denial acts between children and adults,for instance,adults have a preference to use mitigating to preserve face,while children prefer to use non-verbal resources to supplement.When teaching children multimodal communicative competence,educational programs need to be designed according to language development of children and their communicative needs so that they can be better adapted to actual communicative situations.Although this study compared children’s and adults’multimodal denial acts,the sample size was relatively small and focused on the Chinese region.Future research can expand the sample size and compare multimodal denial acts across regions and cultures.