A Contrastive Study Of Multimodal Discourse In Primary English Textbooks

Discourse analysis is aimed at language,mainly focusing on its system,semantic structure,and relationships with social culture or psychological cognition,regardless of other semiotic resources to construct meanings,such as images,sounds,colors,cartoons or something.While the multimodal discourse analysis came into being in the early 1990 s,which has overcome these limitations to a great extent.With a series of semiotic resources combined together to construct meanings,multimodal discourse analysis develops surprisingly rapidly as one of the burgeoning branches of applied linguistics.It not only reflects a far-reaching influence of modern information technology,but achieves an expansion of research fields,contents as well as methods of discourse analysis,thus arousing wide attention of scholars.As one of the most important pedagogical discourses,textbook discourse has played a significant role in the process of transmission of knowledge and culture.It is not only an indispensable learning tool and resource,but also the basis of effective teaching with achievement of teaching objectives.Along with the development and advancement of multimedia technology as well as the constantly changing ways of thinking,the types and contents of English textbooks have also undergone tremendous changes.English textbook discourse is not a single black-and-white text-based discourse any longer;instead,it has become multimodal discourse with a series of semiotic elements combined to construct meaning.Therefore,both students' and teachers' understanding and multiliteracies of textbook discourse provide new requirements and challenges for textbook compilers.With reference to the previous studies on multimodal discourse analysis,most of the researches on multimodal English textbook discourse at present are still confined to middle schools and universities.Studies in terms of primary English textbook discourse,especially those for pupils of lower grades,are rarely involved.However,children have unique cognizance and sensitivity to the image,color,or other multimodal elements.This is the reason why the author chooses this topic.With the methods of multimodal discourse analysis and questionnaire analysis,this thesis is devoted to a contrastive multimodal discourse analysis between two sets of 3rd grade primary English textbooks in China,PEP and SEPH,under the framework of Kress & van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar and Martinec & Salway's Image-Text Relations.Through detailed analysis and discussion,the author attempts to provide some valuable pedagogical implications for both students and front-line teachers according to the results of the research,with great expectations that teachers and students could have a better and in-depth understanding of the multimodal textbook discourse.And the training of students' multiliteracies could make it possible to better serve education,thus improving teaching and learning efficiency.In addition,the contrastive multimodal discourse analysis of the two sets of English textbooks also provides a reference for the selection and compiling of textbooks.Both quantitative and qualitative research methods are employed in this study.And it mainly consists three parts: contrastive analysis of textbook discourse between PEP and SEPH,analysis of image-text relations and questionnaire analysis.[1] Based on the framework of Visual Grammar,the author makes a discussion of three sub-modalities.Starting with the image,the author brings out a classification of all images presented in two sets of textbooks.By contrast,realization of representational,interactive,and compositional meanings in Visual Grammar is discussed,and the author summarizes similarities and differences of features of images in Visual Grammar within two sets of textbooks.For representational images,conceptual representation is more preferred in PEP,and narrative representation is preferred in SEPH.In narrative representations,reactional process is much more preferred in both PEP and SEPH with a larger percentage for PEP,instead,SEPH contains more action processes.In conceptual representation,the symbolic process plays the dominant role in both PEP and SEPH.The classificational process ranks the second highest with a larger percentage for SEPH than for PEP,which implies the diversity of images in SEPH.And the analytical process is the least frequently used one.For the construction of interactive meanings,images of demand and offer in contact are roughly equally distributed with a slightly larger proportion of demandthan offer,and there are few differences between two sets of textbooks.With respect to perspective,both vertical and horizontal perspectives are employed in two sets of textbooks.For vertical perspective,the eye-level enjoys more popularity.In realization of compositional meanings,most of the images in PEP and SEPH are in the center,with higher information value and salience.With reference to framing,the linear composition is more frequently used in both textbooks as it makes the layout much clearer and beautiful.Furthermore,the author makes a detailed contrastive analysis of colors and characters in two textbooks.[2] The second part is devoted to a summary of image-text relations presented in two sets of textbooks on the basis of the theory of Salway & Martinec's Image-Text Relations,and the result reveals that all of the four relations: image & text independent,image & text complementary,image subordinate to text and text subordinate to image can be found in both PEP and SEPH.Of the four relations,image & text complementary is more frequently employed under which image and text co-exist as supplement to each other.Such relationship helps lower graders improve their comprehensive ability in the process of English learning.[3] The author also quantitatively analyzes the collected statistics of teachers' and students' questionnaires microscopically and specifically,thus obtaining students' and teachers' basic knowledge and use of multimodal textbook discourse,which supplements previous multimodal discourse analysis and guarantees the reliability and validity of the present study.It shows that both teachers and students are basically satisfied with the current setting of multimodal semiotic resources presented in English textbooks.However,most of the students lack sensitivity to these multi-modal symbols,and understanding as well as employment of them is also far from enough.In addition,teachers' guidance of these multimodal semiotic resources is not standardized and in-depth.Several pedagogical implications for cultivating students' multiliteracies are provided according to the results of the present study.For teachers,they should further study the textbooks profoundly,better understand and make most use of the multimodal representations in textbook discourse,and then lead students to carry outconstant training of multiliteracies in teaching practice so as to cultivate and improve students' interests in English.For students,they are supposed to actively take part in classroom activities,and get involved in the role play in order to improve their sensitivity and identification of multimodal resources,and ultimately help students achieve learning goals.