Meaning Potential Of Multimodality And The Development Of Multiliteracies

Multimodality is a recent focus as well as an old topic in linguistics,communication theory and cognitive science.Human communication often involves an integrated use of language,sound,image and some other modes.Both mono-modality and multimodality have been used since ancient times,but with the progress of human civilization and the development of science and technology,mono-modality is increasingly giving place to multimodality.Consequently,greater importance is attached to multimodality and Systemic Functional Linguistics is widely employed in multimodal discourse analysis.Systemic functional linguistics holds the view of social semiotics,regarding language,image,sound and other modes as human meaning potential.In human communication,in light of the immediate context of situation and the social cultural context,people employ various semiotic resources in social interaction and thus produce multimodal discourse.Therefore,scholars in systemic functional linguistics synthesize many methods,such as discourse analysis,corpus concordancing,computer simulation,etc.to explore language,image,sound and other meaning resources comprehensively,and they describe and analyze various modes and meaning resources in multimodal discourse,aiming to reveal the complicated meaning system.In China,primary school English textbooks,guided by the English Curriculum of Compulsory Education(2011)and in view of the cognitive characteristics and learning processes of pupils,emphasize both language and image,and synthesize the meaning potential of image and language and their interaction to represent English knowledge and impart English skills,which has become a prominent feature of such discourse.When employing these textbooks to teach language,we should not only lay emphasis on English language to cultivate students' English skills,but also pay attention to cultivating their multiliteracies and guiding them to interpret the meaning potential and interaction of image and language in a comprehensive way.This study,based on systemic functional linguistics,adopts the methods of multimodal discourse analysis to explore the multimodal characteristics and pedagogical implications of primary school English textbooks,focusing particularly on the following three questions:(1)How many types of images are utilized in primary school English textbooks and what is the distribution pattern of different types of images? What are the relationships of image and text?(2)What is the meaning potential of the images in primary school English textbooks? How do the images combine with the text to reflect the teaching objectives and realize the teaching functions?(3)What inspirations does appropriate understanding and interpreting the image-text relations and their meaning potential have for cultivating students' multiliteracies?In order to attain these research goals,the present study adopts the following main research methods: literature study,observational study,quantitative analysis and multimodal discourse analysis.Based on a comprehensive and meticulous literature review,a multimodal analytic framework is constructed to scrutinize image-text relations and multiliteracies.Then authentic data are collected from primary school English textbooks to analyze various images and their meaning potential,image-text relations and their functions,and ultimately explore the enlightenments of image-text relations for multiliteracies.The major conclusions are as follows:(1)The image-text relations in primary school English textbooks include elaboration,decoration,projection,typography,inherent,organizational and extension.Elaboration covers a wide range of sections in every unit and recycle of the textbooks,especially in the section of vocabulary study.Decoration is common in the textbooks,distributed in various sections,especially in the main pictures of every unit.Projection(including speech bubble and thought bubble)also covers most sections of the textbooks,especially in the main pictures and dialogue sections.(2)Icons can be found throughout the textbook,indicating both consistency and diversity.As to the meaning of composition,the images are mainly represented in the text-before-image and image-before-text.With regard to the content of image and text,there are more instances of text conveying more information than image.As to the meaning of interaction,the images are mainly demand instead of offer,the social distance is intimate and the characters in the images are equal.As to the meaning of representation,the images mainly belong to reaction process,especially in dialogue section.In addition,the Chinese elements are prevalent in the images of primary school English textbooks(the new curriculum),which meets the requirements of new curriculum.(3)The appropriate understanding and interpreting the images-text relations and their meaning potential in the primary school English textbooks(new curriculum)not only helps to promote the students' learning English phonetics,vocabulary and basic grammar and cultivate students' basic skills of listening,reading,speaking and writing,but also cultivate and improve students' multiliteracies by referring to the multimodal discourse in textbooks.Basing on the above research conclusions,we can see that there are abundant images in the primary school English textbooks(new curriculum),and then multimodal analysis based on SFL can be well applied to expound on the functions and reveal the meaning potential of image-text relations,so it is of great significance to cultivate students' multiliteracies.With the development of multimodal discourse analysis and language education theory and research methods,it is necessary to combine various education discourse,including the primary school English textbooks,and conduct comprehensive and intensive study of image-text meaning potential and multiliteracies cultivation to construct a set of complete,compatible and universal theoretical system and analysis framework.And then lots of case studies focusing on multimodal discourse should be conducted to provide sufficient solid evidence for the theoretical system and analysis framework.