Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of New Horizon College English Course-book

Since the appearance of discourse analysis as a subject in the early 1950s, it has been greatly developed in its theory and practice. With the improvement of research methods and the expansion of research content, the researchers have achieved a lot from their initial work of discourse analysis on advertisements, literary text, conversations and so on. to their recent work of discourse analysis on multimodal discourses. Course-books which are an important tool for conveyance of knowledge and culture, have attracted more researchers to be involved in this field. With development of information technology and word-processing, the design of course-books features multimodality. Obviously it is imperative to do multimodal discourse analysis on the course-book. Multimodal is referred to composition of two or more than two means of representation and communication, such as, still image, gesture, posture, speech, music, writing, or new configurations of the elements of these.Kress and van Leeuwen published Reading Image in 1996, through fifteen years' development and perfection, it has become a mature theory to guide the multimodal discourse analysis. This thesis, mainly based on the theory of Image Grammar and Royce's intersemiotic complementarity framework makes a multimodal discourse analysis on the course-book New Horizon College English to seek answers for the questions as follows:(1) How are resources integration principle and meaning compression principle are followed in New Horizon College English course-books. (2) How do words and images correspondingly cooperate to construct the meaning in New Horizon College English course-book. (3) Why do modes differ between viewing, listening & speaking course-books and reading and writing course-book.The results of this study reveal that this type of course-book is a typical example of multimodal texts. The course-book designers employ all kinds of symbolic resources to convey the knowledge and meaning making. Furthermore, all the symbolic resources are cooperating together to construct the meaning. However, the different tasks and different cognitive characteristics between the writing and reading class and viewing, listening & speaking class, determine the mode selection and symbolic resources employment. And the multimodal discourse analysis on the College English course-book is helpful to the cultivation of college students'mutliliteracies.