Cultivating Multiliteracies Through The Writing Section In College Entrance Examination

With the development of science and technology, the dominant role of language in communication and mass media is challenged by other semiotic resources such as image, sound, and color. The deployment of more than one semiotic resource in constructing meaning and forming social relations is gaining popularity. Accordingly, traditional discourse analysis which deals with the exclusive field of language is compelled to take into serious consideration of other semiotic resource systems and the so called Multimdodal Discourse Analysis comes into being. Drawing on Systemic Functional Grammar, Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) proposed a framework for visual analysis which interprets images in terms of their representational, interactive and compositional meanings. This approach to multimodal discourse provides us with a powerful toolkit to account for meanings arising from images and the integrated use of the visual and verbal sources.Meanwhile, in the multimodal trend of the world communication and mass media, literacy is not just a matter of language but a matter of abilities of reading and designing multimedia. The concept "Multiliteracies" was firstly brought forward by The New London Group, which demands not only the ability to read and write in language, but also the ability to read all the multimodalities presented in a discourse, to integrate them into a coherent meaning, and the ability to express one’s intension with them.This thesis, with reference to the Systemic Functional approach, analyzes images and verbiage in picture compositions within Kress and van Leeuwen’s framework, aiming to provide strategies to cultivate multiliteracies through finding how the visual and verbal semiotics construe meaning and construct social reality respectively, and also their cooperation in meaning-making.This thesis makes an attempt of a qualitative analysis based on incisive exploration of typological data. Chapter One is a general introduction, briefly introduces the background of this study, the research questions and the organization of the thesis. Chapter Two firstly reviews some key notions in multimodal discourse analysis, and it is followed with the previous studies on the multimodal discourse analysis and the demands of cultivating multiliteracies. Chapter Three explicits the theoretical framework to this research. In Chapter Four, two case studies of two kinds of picture compositions are carried out respectively, the narrative and the abstract style. The two picture compositions are analyzed from the perspective of three metafunctions within each mode according to Visual Grammar and Systemic Functional Grammar. Interaction between the two modes is also studied. The data used in this analysis are chosen from College Entrance Examination of Beijing in the year of 2008. Upon the summary of the analysis in the previous chapters, Chapter Five comes up with specific strategies to cultivate multiliteracies. The discussion is developed from two aspects, the abilities of reading and construing multimodal discourses. Chapter Six summarizes the major findings and presents the limitations as well as suggestions for further investigations.