| Multimodal discourse is a set of practices which entails going beyond language as social semiotic and making use of two or multiple semiotic resources for meaning making, for instance, language, visual images, music, space, gesture and so on. In the historical context of visual culture, everyday life becomes more pervasively mediated by multimodal discourse and is increasingly shaped by representations which are produced all over the world. Consequently, multimodal research is of great significance in theory and practice.Theoretically, the multimodal discourse which embraces image as a discourse poses particular challenges for discourse analysts who have worked primarily with verbal texts. The limits of monomodal grammar will be easily reached in a lot of fields. Academic disciplines that focus on monomodality, such as that of linguistics, must come in dialogue with other fields of research, for instance, visual communication studies and media studies, to facilitate the interdisciplinary nature of multimodal research.Practically, the historical context of global visual culture brings new challenges of "visual literacy" or "visuacy" as a matter of survival for readers, especially for English educators. As a result, Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) has become a very exciting research frontier. While MDA as a new practicing field is emerging and flourishing in different nations and across many different fields, there is very limited literature on Multimodality in China.Drawing upon Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (VG) and based on SFL, the present study is to contribute to this relatively new field by proposing a new model of MDA as the analytical tool in an attempt to provide a better understanding of the images and image-text relations of the PPT courseware in College English teaching—covering the period from the year2005to2007, and further to unravel the implications for the elaboration of multimodal research and for Multimedia Literacy and to meet the opportunities and challenges that the visual culture has thrust upon the college English teachers.Fruitful illuminating creativities are derived from the detailed sample analyses: on the one hand, the system we use for analyzing the images combines the color as a cross-functional system and the theories of representational meaning of images in VG; on the other hand, the system for analyzing image-text relations that we have presented combines Halliday’s logico-semantic relations with Barthes’foundational classification of image-text relations. The system is generalized, applicable to many different image-text genres, and its categories are based on perceivable realizations. Our analysis of image-text combinations of the PPT courseware in College English teaching is based on this, and in our account we have focused more on image-text relations of equal status. It may well be that the system will need to be modified as new image-text genres are evolved. In addition, some features to classify status relations and logico-semantic relations are also concluded in the analysis of the image-text relations.This thesis includes six chapters with the arrangement as the following:Chapter1briefly introduces the research rationales and purpose of the present study. Chapter2presents a review of multimodality and MDA practices. Chapter3presents the theoretical foundations for the present study. Chapter4gives analysis of the representational meaning of image in the sample transparencies. Chapter5gives the analysis of the image-text relations in the samples. Chapter6concludes by summarizing major findings of the research, by discussing the theoretical and practical contributions of the study, and by suggesting limitations and further directions for research. |
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