Ideational Meaning Of Multimodal Discourse

Language is no longer the only dominant medium of transmitting information and expressing thoughts with the development of science and technology. This development has increased the intermingling of written text, images, audio and video in creating the meaning which makes the linguists more aware that the meaning also arises from the cooperation of various modes of communication. Therefore, the employment of various semiotic resources in our daily life makes multimodality and the analysis of the text combining images and verbiage, i.e. Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) become the focus of the recent research.The evolving multimodal pedagogic environment for teaching English as a foreign language (henceforth EFL) has provided us a newly discovered field of research which is still almost unexplored. It calls for a social, semiotic and linguistic explanation. The overarching aim of the present research is to explore the application of MDA to the multimodal pedagogic materials. This study concentrates on how language and visual images cooperate with each other to construct ideational meaning in multimodal textbooks for teaching English as a foreign language (hereafter EFL) for primary education.The rationale for the present research is Systemic Functional Linguistics (hereafter SFL) developed by Halliday (1994) with its recent development in ideational metafunction and Visual Grammar (hereafter VG), a systemic functional semiotic approach which is used to analyze the visual images. The data of this study is composed of four EFL textbooks for primary education, published by Hunan Youth and Children's Press in 2003. They are designed for the students from grade three to grade six, so they could form an entire series for the students of primary schools. The research design is comprised of two respects. First, it investigates the characteristics of the visual images in the multimodal primary EFL textbook discourse, and explores the way in which those images construe ideational meanings. Second, it discusses the relationship between linguistic and visual meaning-making resources in the multimodal primary EFL textbook discourse and the effects the interaction make.From the perspective of the visual grammar, speech process accounts for a large proportion of the visual resources in the multimodal primary school EFL textbooks. The research indicates that the elements of the verbal text and the image reiterate each other enabling the multimodal text to be coherent and making the reader track the text more easily, and the image shows the features of the character in great detail which provides the reader with unmentioned background information in the verbal text which draws the reader's attention readily and gives the reader more space to imagine and dig deeper, while the verbal image can expand the experiential meaning expressed by the image, enabling the reader to associate more around the image. In other words, the cooperation of the multiple modes helps make the discourse vivid and lively, express the experiential meaning more clearly and fully, and encourage the reader to dig further and think critically. The thesis has also proved that SFL and the visual grammar are useful tools for the analysis of the interaction between the visual and the verbal semiotic resources which realizes the experiential meaning in an integral way in the multimodal discourse. At the same time, the analysis shows that the multimodal discourse is helpful in the EFL teaching and gives some suggestions for the teachers. The teacher can ask questions related to the images and try to connect the questions with the verbal text and activate the students'background information.