Analyzing Visual Images In Chemistry Textbooks From A Multimodal Perspective

Textbooks play an extremely important role in educating people and cultural transmission.Textbook discourse is always one of the main research objects of systemic functional linguists.Many scholars at home and abroad have analyzed the characteristics of language from a functional linguistic perspective.And since Kress and van Leeuwen put forward visual grammar in 1996,the research on textbooks has turned from mono-modal to multimodal.Scholars began to explore how language,images,color and other modalities construe meaning together.However,domestic studies mainly focus on language teaching,especially English textbooks,and lack research on science education.Though pioneering studies were made abroad to explore the multimodal design of science textbooks,none of them are specialized in chemistry.Besides,till now no comparative research has been made on the visual designs of foreign and domestic science textbooks.Therefore,this thesis selects chemistry textbooks as the object of the research,analyzes their visual designs from a multimodal perspective and then makes a comparison with the visual designs of foreign science textbooks.This project selects all the images from two junior high school textbooks and two senior high school textbooks published by People's Education Press as the research data,and examine their visual designs from three dimensions: classification,framing and formality following the analytic framework put forward by Dimopoulos et al.in 2003.Then the junior high school chemistry textbooks are compared with the senior high school chemistry textbooks in terms of their multimodal design.A comparison is also made between domestic and foreign science textbooks.Last,it explores the implications the research results may have on China's science education.The analysis suggests that overall,the visual images in the four chemistry textbooks feature weak classification,low framing and low formality.Secondly,compared with the junior high school textbooks,there are more conventional,hybrid and high formality images in senior high school chemistry textbooks.Also,differentfrom foreign science textbooks,domestic textbooks lay more stress on students' engagement in the pedagogical process to understand the images.Hopefully,these findings will benefit not only the cultivation of students' multiliteracies but also the compilation of chemistry textbooks.