Effects Of English Textbook Illustrations On Junior High School Students' Emotion And Attitude

Emotion and attitude have become one of the main concerns in the curriculum reform of elementary education. In Curriculum Standards for English promulgated by the Ministry of Education in 2001, emotion and attitude are required as an integral part of learning, and as one of the most significant teaching contents and teaching goals. Junior secondary English textbooks contain a large number of illustrations which range from visual images only to images with verbal texts. The value of illustrations has been confirmed by a sufficient number of studies. Some researches show that illustrations have effect on students'emotion and attitude. Previous studies on the effect of textbook illustrations are mainly qualitative studies. Few quantitative studies have been made on English textbook illustrations and students'emotion and attitude.Based on Dual Coding Theory and Multimodal Discourse Analysis, the present study combines quantitative method with qualitative method to explore the effect of English textbook illustrations on students'emotion and attitude. The emotion and attitude in the present study refer to the interest, motivation, confidence, willpower, cooperation and other relevant factors influence students'learning process and outcomes listed in the Curriculum Standards for English. An experiment was carried out during the period from September, 2010 to January, 2011. Two parallel classes of year 7 from No. 82 middle school of Lanzhou were selected as control class and experiment class. In September, 2010 the author made a questionnaire survey on students'emotion and attitude in English leaning in both classes. Then, in the experiment class, the English teacher emphasized and analyzed the textbook illustrations in English class, but not in control class. Such a teaching way applied in the two classes lasted for a semester----from September, 2010 to January, 2011. In January, 2011 the author did the questionnaire survey again to investigate the emotion and attitude change of the students in two classes. Meanwhile, another questionnaire concerning students'response to English textbook illustrations was completed. All the data got above was analyzed with the help of computer software SPSS17.0.The results indicate that English textbook illustrations have positive effects on students'emotion and attitude in English learning. The effects include three aspects: 1) illustrations stimulate students'interest in learning English; 2) illustrations enhance students'confidence in English learning and drive students to express themselves confidently in English class; 3) illustrations are helpful in cultivating students'team spirit, which impel students to cooperate with classmates in class to finish tasks. The present study showed the significance of textbook illustrations for stimulating students'emotion and attitude, by which the author give advice for English teachers to make full use of textbook illustrations in language teaching to meet the requirement of emotion and attitude goals of Curriculum Standards for English.Yet the study is limited by the personal vision and knowledge. The sample size is small and the participants are from one junior secondary school, the findings may fail to represent the general populations of junior secondary school students throughout China. Time is short for the experiment which may have negative influence on the accuracy of the findings. Future studies are needed to explore the influence of textbook illustrations on different age students and different English level students, which are overlooked in the present study. Many aspects of the effect of textbook illustrations should be explored in the future.