A Study Of The Image-Text Relations In Junior English Textbook Go For It

A variety of semiotic resources are applied in textbook discourses, so that the textbooks appear increasing multimodal characteristics. How to understand multimodal resources in textbooks thoroughly, how multimodal resources co-construct meanings in textbook discourses and how to develop students' multiliteracies by making full use of multimodal resources in textbooks are the issues faced by scholars from the area of education.Martinec and Salway's framework of image-text relations (2005) will be adopted as the analytical framework, the present study tries to answer these two questions:(1) what are the statuses of images and text in Go for If? (2) What are the logico-semantic relations of images and text in Go for It?The five books of new version (2012) of junior English textbooks Go for It will be use as research materials. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are conducted focused on the relationship of image and text. From the classification of images, which have 358 images are enough to conduct the study.The following findings and results are obtained:1. The number and distribution is unbalanced of four statues in textbooks. The status of "image subordinates to text" accounts for the majority (42.5%) of the total, which indicates the textbook editors emphasize that the status of the text is more important than that of image. These images mainly play an auxiliary role in the meaning construction; however, "text subordinate to image" occupies small scale (21.5%) relatively, which ignores the information function of image and impedes the development of abstract thinking; "independent" is realized in 76 instances, which accounts for 21.2%. The distribution is inversely proportional to grade level, which is in accord with students'cognitive feature; "complementary" accounts for the minority (14.8%) of the total, which indicates that the significance of context co-constructed by image and text has been ignored to some extent.2. Among the logico-semantic relations between images and text, as well as unbalanced, the "projection of wording" occupies a dominant percentage (24.3%) of all images in the five textbooks, especially in lower grade, which indicates that the editor pay more attention to communicative function of language; on the contrary, "projection of ideal" accounts for small scale (3.4%), which is bad to cultivate students' divergent thinking. What's more, "text more general" occupies a large scale (16.5%) which indicates that image realizes more specific meaning than that of the corresponding text does; however, "image more general" occupies the smallest scale (2.5%), the image's function of generalizing meaning has been ignored. In addition, "extension" and "enhancement (temporal, spatial, and causal)" accounts for 9.8% and 22.3% respectively.The results show that images and texts interact with each other and co-construct multimodal discourse meanings. In most cases, multimodal discourses exert a positive influence on junior English teaching and learning, sometimes like a double-edged sword. And better teaching results will be achieved by taking advantage of visual images in textbooks.Based on the above findings and results, some suggestions as to given the editors, students, and teachers. The study on junior English textbooks Go for It is meaningful for junior English teaching. And the results of the present study are significant for both the development of students' multiliteracies and textbook design.