Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Language Learning Module On Confucius Institute And British Council Webpages

The advent of Internet has promised that people are no longer confined to the language-oriented way of conveying information with multiple meaning-making resources such as images,sounds,and colors accessible.As a result,multimodal discourse research has begun to emerge and flourish.However,the total amount of research on webpages from a multimodal discourse perspective is relatively small,and the existing studies mostly focus on the webpages of outreach and service industries or the hypertext translation of webpages,and there are few studies on the webpages of international language and cultural promotion institutions.Against such background,this study aims to investigate the characteristics of the visual resources on the “Language Learning” module of the Confucius Institute and the British Council webpages,based on visual grammar theory,thereby confirming the interpretation of this theory in web discourse and contributing to the study of multimodal discourse.In the paper,a total of 453 “Language Learning” course covers uploaded on the above two websites in March are selected as research objects.Based on the visual grammar theory,this study adopts a content analysis method and a comparative analysis method to analyze and explore their meaning-making presentation from the perspective of image mode and color mode in three dimensions: representational meaning,interactive meaning,and compositional meaning,in order to find out the major characteristics of the images on such webpages and the features of these images to achieve meaning construction.In addition,by comparing the similarities and differences in the distribution of visual resources between the two institutions,the paper also tries to explain the differences from the cultural and webpage-design perspective.This study reaches a conclusion as follows: the similarities between Confucius Institute and British Council are demonstrated by the fact that neither side uses speech and mental process to convey the representational meaning;in the interactive sense,both sides tend to achieve contact by actively providing information and presenting the frontal aspects of the picture participants to the viewer,and most of the pictures present the photo content from an eye-level perspective.In the compositional sense,images on both sides are presented in close numbers in all three categories of information value.The differences are that the Confucius Institute’s webpages achieves its conceptual representation meaning mainly through the classificational process(53.40%),while the British Council expresses its narrative representation meaning mainly through the action process(51.32%).In terms of interactive meaning,68.03% of the Confucius Institute’s pictures reflect a long social distance from the viewer,and the modality values of its images are more evenly distributed.On the other hand,the British Council’s photos are mainly of medium social distance(66.67%),and all of them exhibit high modality values(98.11%).In terms of compositional significance,the Confucius Institute mainly assigns information values in a center-margin manner(40.82%),but the British Council mainly conveys information values in a top-bottom structure(45.91%).In conclusion,the Confucius Institute’s courses are mainly “online resource-based teaching”,and the teaching content is mainly language learning and traditional Chinese culture,with low saturation,bright color avoidance,low color variety and low modality values as the main characteristics of the pictures,while the British Council’s English learning website mainly provide “online interactive teaching courses”,with the teaching content mainly includes English learning,and contemporary social life and thought,so its images are mostly real-world scenarios,focusing on high-definition quality and moderate exposure and reasonable color matching to resonate with viewers.In summary,this study offers aids to expand the scope of research on multimodal discourse analysis,help enhance interpretability and application of visual grammar,and thus,promote the development and improvement of this research field;on the other hand,it also provides web viewers with new perspective for image interpretation,and give people a more comprehensive and scientific understanding of the role and meaning of multimodality on webpages.