A Study Of Attitudinal Resources In Narratives Of English Textbooks For Senior High Schools

Reading plays a significant part in English learning. However, according to recent researches on English reading of senior high school students in China, problems still exist. The main problem is that students can only get the surface meaning and are unable to understand the main idea, underlying meaning of reading passages or the writer’s purpose. One of the most important reasons lies in their lack of consciousness of discourse.The Appraisal Theory is concerned with interpersonal meanings at the level of discourse semantics. Attitude system is the central system within appraisal system. Exploration of attitudinal resources can help readers to reveal the writers’ attitudes and to discover the implied meanings. Although research on application of the Appraisal Theory to college English reading has been done domestically, scant attention has been paid to the study of the reading teaching in high schools. Research at high schools is mainly focused on the in-class practices, with less theoretical support.Narrative is the most widely used and highly valued genre in all cultures. In English textbooks there is usually a large proportion of this genre. It is through the interpersonal meanings that we can see the attractiveness of narratives. The application of the Appraisal Theory to narratives can be greatly beneficial to the adequate understanding of the texts.Therefore, based on the above background, this research is conducted to identify and categorize attitudinal resources used to convey interpersonal meaning, point out and analyze the distribution features of the attitudinal resources in different stages of narratives and explore the functions of them in narratives of English textbooks for senior high schools in order to investigate how writers realize their intentions and purposes by employing the attitudinal resources.Methodologically, the author takes the 19 narratives in English textbooks for Senior High Schools, published by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press as analyzed samples and utilizes the method of qualitative description and quantitative statistics, based on the theoretical framework of the Appraisal Theory( Martin & White, 2005) with its special focus on the domain of Attitude. Its three subsystems, namely, Affect, Judgment and Appreciation are examined respectively. Among the 19 narratives, three narratives are selected as samples to in detail explore the roles that the attitudinal resources play.Based on the statistics analysis and the detailed analysis of the three narratives, it is found that on the whole, there are abundant attitudinal resources in the narratives. All of the three sub-categories of Attitude coordinate and interact with each other to express writers’ intentions and achieve the narrative goals. In terms of their distribution features, Appreciation resources are most extensively used in narratives. They also take up the largest part in the Orientation stage. They are adopted to introduce the environment, events and characters participating in the narratives. Affect resources are relatively small, which focus on writers’ opinions and writers’ invitation of readers to share their feelings. Judgment resources are the least frequently employed in narratives. They evaluate characters and events, facilitating readers’ understanding of different roles and characters. The distinctive distributions of attitudinal resources at different stages of narratives result from different stage purposes. The distribution of the attitudinal resources displays how the writers weave the resources and develop the plot in order to push the goals. Furthermore we see the interactive function of theories of attitude system and narrative is helpful for readers to understand narratives. Through this interaction, first readers are able to find how the attitudinal resources reveal the implicit meanings underlying the surface; secondly, through attitudinal resources distributed in each stage, it can help readers get the main idea from the perspective of the writer’s attitude and thus the whole mood of narratives; thirdly the readers can perceive how the writers arouse their emotions and design implications by the means of the interpersonal meaning. In conclusion, this research proves that the interactive function of the application of the Appraisal Theory to narratives is significant for students to understand texts for senior high schools and improve their reading proficiency.This paper is expected to contribute to the understanding of the deep meaning of narratives for students and a practical teaching method for teachers. Also it tries to raise some enlightenment of reading teaching and provide some theoretical application for researchers and senior high school English teachers.