A Social Semiotic Analysis Of Cultural Meaning-making Resources In Advance With English

In this age of globalization, there is an increasing awareness that culture is coming to the fore of the English language teaching field. One key requirement for English learning is the cultivation of global cultural consciousness and intercultural citizenship. As a vital part in language teaching and learning, textbooks play a significant role in culture teaching. However, most researches on analyzing culture in textbooks look at culture primarily in terms of frequency of content in that they treat culture as an objectifiable component, instead of highlighting the dynamic nature of culture and interpretation. There is also a trend that most studies on textbook discourse are monomodal analysis, which focus on the characteristics and functions of certain modes of semiosis and ignores the interactions of various meaning-making resources. Such studies cannot make an insightful or reflective understanding of culture in textbook discourses. Hence, it is necessary to explore the cultural meaning potentials that the different modes of meaning-making resources generate through their complex interrelations.Multimodal discourse analysis is a new approach to discourse analysis based on the semiotic theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics. It integrates language and other semiotic resources, such as visual images, music, color, etc., to construct meanings. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to make studies on culture in textbooks from new perspectives. The present thesis adopts a systemic functional semiotic perspective proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen in outlining a range of the meaning-making resources in English textbooks, and making a description of characteristics of cultural meaning-making resources. Then the interrelationship in meaning-making between the text, image and task is studied based on Royce’s Framework of Intersemiotic Complementarity. The present study has been conducted from two aspects. First, characteristics of cultural meaning-making resources employed in the textbook Advance with English are researched from the modality of visual images; second, the intersemiotic complementarities between text, image and task are analyzed in cultural interpretations.The major findings show that(1) the image modality has close relationships with social cultural contexts and dominant naturalistic coding orientation makes the resources read as an “objective” information, attempting to reinforce the preferred cultural meanings in students’ mind.(2) The intersemiotic relationships between text, image and task, and the cultural meaning-making process in classrooms are heavily controlled rather than dynamic interpretations of culture.The findings of the present study are significant for both the development of students’ cultural consciousness in EFL classroom and textbook design. The study on English textbooks Advance with English is also meaningful for the senior high school English teaching.