Comparison Analysis Of Two Types Of English Textbooks

Textbooks,as the first-hand resources and most important learning tools,help students and teachers to achieve teaching goals.With the rapid development of technology,textbooks have undergone tremendous changes,from mainly displaying in the form of language to containing various semiotic modes,such as pictures,rich colors,sound recordings and so on.Textbooks tend to be multimodal in this sense.This thesis aims to study how these semiotic modes construct meaning in English textbooks and put forward some suggestions for the textbook designing.This thesis selects the reading parts(each unit one piece,a total of 55)from two types of widely used high school English textbooks as the research subjects.From the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis to make a comparison between these two types of English textbooks,under the instruction of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Visual Grammar,exploring three research questions: 1.how do the research subjects realize representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning;2.what are the differences and similarities of two types of English textbooks when they construct meaning;3.how to develop these English textbooks designing to improve the effectiveness and interestingness of English teaching.The study mainly involves visual modes,such as visual images,typography,colors and typeface.The findings are as follow: 1.all modes,such as visual images,typography,colors and typeface co-work to convey representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning in two types of English textbooks.2.there are some similarities and differences of these textbooks in constructing meaning.The similarities are: firstly,photos are most frequently used in two types of English textbooks and most images represent action process and reaction process.This is because these images clearly represent the real world,demonstrating the relations of image participants.Secondly,two types of English textbooks prefer putting verbal texts in the center,occupying large area.It can be seen that verbal texts are the most important part in textbooks.Thirdly,a variety of colors are used in textbooks.Black is generally used in main body which means more formality,white and light colors are used in background which means clearness and tidiness,and other bright colors are used in titles and subtitles to show vividness and interestingness.The differences are:Firstly,there are 54 visual images in New Senior English textbooks while 47 visual images in New Standard English textbooks.Apparently,New Senior English textbooks aim to use images to make abstract words and knowledge intuitive.Secondly,New Senior English textbooks apply fewer colors to make the reading discourses unified and formal;New Standard English textbooks use more colors to attract attention and correspond to the topic.Thirdly,different layouts are utilized in two types of English textbooks,New Senior English textbooks select one-page spread while New Standard English textbooks choose both one-page spread and double-page spread,which convey that New Standard English textbooks are more flexible and close to native English reading materials.3.There are some inspirations on textbooks improvement.New Senior English textbooks should add more types of images,such as tables,flow charts,comics,apply native English layout and employ more colors to make the reading discourses flexible,lively and attractive.New Standard English textbooks should distinguish the key words from other words in order to attract students' attention.The results of the present study are significant for the development of English textbooks designing.