A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Junior High School English Textbooks By Yi Lin Press

Textbooks, as an important carrier of knowledge and culture, are appealing to more and more researchers. Multimodal feature is an obvious characteristic of modern textbooks since most textbooks entail abundant static modes like texts and pictures, and some also include dynamic modes like audio and video materials. In this thesis, all the six junior high school English textbooks edited and published by Yi Lin Press and Oxford University Press (China) Limited in 2012, are chosen to be the objects of the study. The thesis analyzes how texts and images in the textbooks cooperate with each other to construct meanings and explores the text-image relations in the textbooks. The research questions are as follows:(1) How are the three main meanings in Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual grammar realized in junior high school English textbooks by Yi Lin Press?(2) According to Martinec and Salway’s system for image-text relations, what are the image-text relations in this set of textbooks? How are they embodied?The thesis mainly adopts the document analysis method and the descriptive method. Based on collecting and sorting out the significant research achievements at home and abroad, the relevant key notions are clarified and the three theoretical foundations are described and explained. In addition to that, the second and the third theory are made use of to conduct a tentative MDA of junior high school English textbooks by Yi Lin Press; thereby the applicability of theories to the textbooks is verified. To be more specific, on the basis of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar theory and Martinec and Salway’s image-text relation theory, a large number of representative cases are selected as the corpus and describes and analyzes the cases, doing the multimodal research. The findings yielded from the MDA include:Firstly, the three aspects of meanings in Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual grammar in this set of multimodal secondary school English textbooks are realized by all the processes, which include narrative process and conceptual process under the representational meaning, contact, social distance and attitude under the interactive meaning and information value, salience and framing under the compositional meaning.Secondly, according to Martinec and Salway’s image-text relation theory, there are two main kinds of image-text relations:status relation and logical semantic relation. The former is embodied by equal status relation and unequal status relation and the latter by expansion and projection.The MDA study is a new attempt to analyze textbook discourse from the perspective of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar theory and Martinec and Salway’s image-text relation theory, providing new evidence for and extending the applicability of the multimodal discourse analysis theories in static texts. The thesis explains the interactive mechanism involved in the junior high school English textbooks by Yi Lin press in which the images and the texts construct meanings, including representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning. Apart from that, it conducts a deep research into the image-text relations and the effect resulting from the image-text interaction.The pedagogical implications of this thesis are as follows:Firstly, teachers should expose a wide range of multimodal resources to students and develop their multimodal literacy ability. Secondly, as for students, the study of multimodal textbooks and other multimodal learning materials are helpful for them to cultivate their interest in learning English, develop their multimodal literacy ability and thereby promote their studies and development. Thirdly, textbook compilers need to match more appropriate and updated images with the texts to help realize the three meta-function meanings.