A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Textbook Discourse

With the advent of Internet+ era and the burgeoning technological innovations, today has witnessed a boom in multimodal communications that strongly shocks traditional intellectual perception. The most obvious embodiment in the field of education is the increasing multimodality in textbooks. Texts are by no means the only channel for knowledge education, with various meaning-making modes making a contribution, like pictures, sounds, colors, layout and so forth. Consequently, it is of immense practical importance to investigate the meaning-making resources in textbooks and how they interact to construct meanings so as to promote textbook resource utilization and classroom efficiency.This thesis, based on the achievements summed up by the predecessors, endeavors to conduct a multimodal discourse analysis of senior high school textbooks in Jiangsu Province, Advance with English, based on the theoretical foundation of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics and Kress & van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar. It takes on a hybrid technique, bridging quantitative and qualitative analysis. On one hand, the meaning-making resources will be sorted out and classified in terms of ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings. On the other hand, Royce's intersemiotic complementarity theory will be applied to explore the meaning potential of different modes and analyze how they interact to achieve an integrated meaning. The present findings indicate that repetition, synonymy and hyponymy are among the top three relations in the realization of ideational meanings. Interpersonally, the speech function of offering information and the first, second address terms are taken into application. To achieve the textual meaning, it makes full of agglomeration structure, color assortment as well as graphical elements. This research also show that Advance with English in higher grades display lower level of multimodality in its compilation. Eventually, suggestions for future textbook compilation are put forward according to the merits and demerits of contemporary textbooks, with the intention of improving textbooks design and facilitating classroom language learning.