Positive Discourse Analysis Of The Reading Materials In Senior High School English Textbooks New Standard English(2019) From The Perspective Of Attitude System

According to English Curriculum Standard for Senior High School(2017),teachers are responsible for passing on knowledge as well as cultivating correct outlook on life,world and values of students consciously.In addition,social responsibility and humanistic quality also need to be improved.Textbooks play an important role in English teaching,which are vital materials and methods to acquire the objectives of English courses.Among them,as an inevitable part in textbooks,reading materials are always the major sources for students to gain knowledge,learn strategies and foster emotional attitudes and values.Therefore,teachers should make full use of textbooks in order to reach the goal of moral education by digging out their humanistic spirits and educational values.The positive ideas reflected in senior high English textbooks deserve more attention and reflection,with necessity to analyze the reading materials in them positively.This study makes an analysis of the reading materials in the textbooks of New Standard English by combining quantitative and qualitative researches under the framework of attitude system from appraisal theory in the view of positive discourse analysis.This study explores the features of positive resources used in the reading materials in New Standard English in terms of frequency and distribution.In addition,this study also delves into the ways the positive resources help construct positive meaning in the reading materials.Through the quantitative statistics conducted by UAM Corpus Tool,it is found that abundant positive attitude resources are involved in the reading materials of New Standard English,accounting for more than seventy percent in all attitude resources.And the three types of positive resources hold a relatively balanced distribution.Among them,judgment resources take up the largest proportion,and affect resources and appreciation resources follow them closely.More importantly,all the three types of resources have more positive parts than negative parts.Through specific qualitative textual analysis,it is found that the positive meanings in the reading materials are mainly conveyed in terms of positive resources in sentences and texts.In sentences,positive affect resources evoke students’ empathy by describing the real feelings of the characters in the textbooks.Positive judgment resources guide students’ behavior and establish a good sense of ethics by evaluating the characters and their performance.Positive appreciation resources help students form a great sense of aesthetic by describing the wonderful things in the textbooks.In texts,the three resources complement each other to convey the positive meaning under the corresponding thematic context.It is hoped that the study will contribute to the further researches in both positive discourse analysis and textbook evaluation.Meanwhile,it is also expected that this study will provide some suggestions and advice for the textbook compilers to improve English textbooks,and be helpful for teachers to transmit positive ideas and students to form positive thoughts.