A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Senior High English

The main way in which domestic high school students acquire English is learning textbooks under the guidance of teachers in classroom setting.Thus,textbooks are of great importance both for teachers and for students.With advances in technology and wide application of various modes in discourse,textbooks have become increasingly multimodalized.Visual images of modern paper textbooks are essential in meaning construction.So far,a lot of studies on discourse analyses have been conducted from a multimodal perspective and multimodal discourse analyses of textbook discourse are plentiful in terms of disciplines.However,multimodal discourse analyses on English textbooks are quite rare and most of them are monomodal analyses without taking visual images into consideration.Against the background of multimodalization of textbook discourse,such studies are unlikely to produce an insightful understanding of textbook discourses.In view of the inadequacy of monomodal analysis of textbook discourse,it is quite necessary to explore textbook discourse from a multimodal perspective.By adopting Kress & van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar and Martinec & Salway's Image-text Relations System,this paper conducts a quantitative analysis on the multimodal resources in Senior High English.The data of the thesis is collected from Senior High English,six English textbooks which are widely used in China.Based on Visual Grammar,the study conducts an exhaustive analysis of 400 visual images in the corpus and explores the three metafunctions of visual images in meaning construction.In addition,the study conducts a further analysis of the status of images and text and their logico-semantic relations based on Martinec & Salway's Image-text Relations System.The results indicate that images and text interact with each other in constructing the multimodal discourse meaning in Senior High English.First,as regards the representational function of visual images,72.75% of them belong to narrative representation only 27.75%belong to conceptual representation.Within narrative representation,the result shows that most of images in Senior High English carry a non-transactional reactional process.Second,as regards the interactive function of visual images,the better part of the images are taken from an eye-eye angle,from a medium shot and a frontal angle and 67.75% of them offer information to the readers.All of them are designed to get the readers involved in the represented participants' world and set a relationship between them.Third,as regards the compositional function of visual images,the result shows that different positionings,different saliences and different framings of the elements work together to convey different meanings.Fourth,with regard to the status of images and text,the most frequent type is that of images being subordinate to text,which accounts for 75.8% of the total,pointing to the fact that textbook designers of Senior High English put the text in a dominant position and visual images in a subordinate position.Fifth,as regards the logico-semantic relations between text and images,the result shows that texts have greater generality than images and the text-image integrations where the text is more general than the image account for for 63.85% of the total,also pointing to the fact that the text carries more information than the image and thus takes up the dominant role in Senior High English.Both advantages and disadvantages of Senior High English will be put forward in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5.By revealing the interactions between multimodal resources and their status and logico-semantic relations,the study hopefully can shed some light on how to develop high-quality multimodal high school English textbooks and also help teachers get a better understanding of multimodal resources and improve students' multiliteracies in the process of studying English textbooks.