Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Happy Chinese,a Chinese Teaching Material For Foreigners

As the core carrier of teaching activities,textbooks are increasingly showing multimodal features.Iamges and texts are two important semiotic resources,and they are important in foreign Chinese teaching.Therefore,it is of great research value to explore meaning potential of images and texts as well as the interactive relationships between them.Based on the visual grammar of Kress and van Leeuvan and the image-text system theory of Martinec and Salway,this study does statistics and analysis on the images and the image-text relations in Happy Chinese.Firstly,on the basis of the visual grammar,the study reveals how the images in the textbooks realize the representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning.Secondly,based on the image-text system theory,the study further analyzes the image-text relations and their functions.Finally,the study explores the ways of cultivating learners’ multiliteracies.It is found that the images in Happy Chinese realize the three visual meanings well.In terms of the representational meaning,the images of action process as well as speech process and metal process prevail in narrative representational images,and the images of conceptual representation are dominated by that of analysis process.They represent the processes of actions and concepts.In terms of the interactive meaning,most images offer the information to learners by “offer” images,and establish a moderate and equal relationship via the medium chose shot and objective perspective.In terms of the compositional meaning,the images organizing the content from the left to the right are the most common.In the aspect of the image-text relations,the image-text relations in Happy Chinese are mainly equal in status,and the expansion takes up the main part of logical-semantic relations.The elaboration is an overwhelming majority in the expansion,which benefits learners of understanding the meaning deeply.The projection consists largely of locution and it plays an exemplary role.According to the above research findings,the visual grammar and the image-text relations theory can be well applied to expound the meaning potential of the images and the functions of the image-text relations.And they are significant to improve learners’ multiliteracies.