Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Junior High School English Textbooks

With the development of multimedia, the textbooks used in secondary school have being changed deeply. The layout of printed textbooks and the design of the images in the textbooks have presented prominent multimodal characteristics. Every element of the multimodal characteristics plays an important role in the process of information conveying. For this reason, it is necessary to do multimodal discourse analysis of the textbooks. Multimodal discourse analysis method is a new research method which based on the social semiotics theory of systemic functional linguistics. It combines language with other meaning sources. Multimodal discourse analysis not only studies the language system in the meaning exchange process, but also studies the effect of image, color, font and other semiotics in the process. This thesis was based on Halliday’s systemic functional grammar, and relied on Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar design. Multimodal discourse analysis was used as the research method to do multimodal discourse analysis of the widely used English textbooks Go for it.This study took 79 discourses in the reading part of the textbooks as its research material. Major findings are as follows: 1) The most widely used image is photograph and the second widely used image is cartoon in the reading part of Go for it. 2) Except the rich color in the image, most discourses use light colors as the background in the reading part of Go for it. 3) The font of the title and the text are different in order to highlight the importance of the text. 4) In the layout of the discourses, its characteristics are that the text occupies the center place and that the image is distributed on the margins. The aim of the layout is to highlight the text, and the effect of the image is to help the text to convey information.This study has some enlightened implications for the educators who use this set of textbooks. It has reference meaning for educators to use it better. Teachers who use the textbooks should concern the following issues: 1) Teachers should change their roles and teaching method. In other words, teachers should change their knowledge initiator role to class organizer and change their teaching method to utilize the content of the textbooks reasonably in order to develop students’ ability to understand multimodal discourses. 2) Teachers should be encouraged to utilize multimedia teaching. It is significant for them to make good use of the most widely used PPT in class. It is valuable for them to arrange the various semiotics in the PPT reasonably to show the representative meaning, compositional meaning and interactive meaning of multimodal discourse. 3) Teachers should take various forms to develop students’ ability to understand Multimodal Discourse. As a result, they can establish their own multimodal discourses. 4) Teachers should be fully aware that multimodal discourse instruction can help improve English language teaching, stimulate students’ learning interest, and achieve ideal learning effectiveness.