Multimodal Analysis On Corporate English Webpage From The Perspective Of Digital Literacy

Internet plays a more and more significant role in our daily life. Internet searching,online learning and online shopping all make our life colorful. With its wide spread andrapid growth, digital literacy---the ability of receiving and creating information bymeans of digital technology, communicating tools or Internet, is increasingly demanded.As the most important information purveyor, webpage is the principal force. Under thebackground of digital literacy, it is quite necessary to do some research on theinformation broadcast of webpage.As a comprehensive text, webpage is a combination of written words, images,colors, sound and videos. However, most of text analysis focuses on the written wordsonly, ignoring the other meaning forms such as images, colors or flashes. Based on thetheory of Halliday’s Systemic---Functional Grammar, scholars Kress and Leeuwen putforward Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA), which includes a variety of meaningunits such as written texts, images, colors and sounds. Each modal acts its own part. Atthe same time, they together create the entire meaning in the whole text by cooperation.Webpage is not simply language material. What is more, it is the corporateoutreach, marketing, product endorsements, so it is the communication bridge betweenthe business and consumers. It plays an important part in stimulating purchase andpersuading consumers to expand their visibility. However, multimodal analyses to studycorporate English webpage are few as yet.This dissertation outlines an overview of the relative theories on multimodalanalysis theory (MDA) and summarizes the features and functions of webpage under thebackground of digital literacy.Nine web pages of famous companies from four industries are chosen as theobjects of the study. Their written words, images, colors and text layouts are analyzedrespectively and then the overall sense in building web modal synergy is studied.Comparative studies between different pages of the same industry reveal a closecorrelation between the role of multi-modal and collaborative action. And by doing this,corporate webpage can help in attracting consumers, marketing and publicizing toachieve the purpose of the enterprise and its products world-renowned. Therefore, thisstudy on corporate webpage layout design has a certain reference value. Moreover, in digital literacy era, the thesis shows some enlightenment on Englishteaching, since it is imperative to carry on multimedia teaching in language field.Therefore, it can be inferred by English teachers who are digital immigrants born before1980in preparing teaching materials in multimodal, in order to attract digital natives’born after1980interests and make teaching more effective.