A Study Of Visual-Verbal Modalities Of English Textbooks For Pupils From The Perspective Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

In the teaching practice,textbooks not only impart knowledge and deliver the social value,but also guide the teaching design and stimulate students' learning interest.In recent years,textbooks also display multimodal characteristics with the development of information technology and word processing skills.That is,modern textbooks are multimodal discourses of teaching materials,which construct discourse meaning by modalities.Multimodal research has become an important issue attracting widely attention by many scholars in recent years.This study applies multimodal discourse analysis into the research of textbook,the book 8 of primary school English textbook,which is issued by Shaanxi Lvyou Book Publishing Co.,Ltd(hereinafter referred to as SLBP primary English textbooks)according to the curricular standard.Bases on Kress and Van Leeuwen's visual analysis theory,the write tries to explore the way to construct meaningful education discourse by discussing the relationship between texts and images in the book.What's more,the application of the multimodal analysis in the textbook is also studied.The study has some major findings by the detailed analysis of the collected data-212 groups of images and texts:The relationship between the modes of text and image in the textbook is dynamic from the perspective of the multimodal discourse.Narrative meaning of text and image coexistence is mainly reflected in motive process and speech&mental process,which are almost half of the total respectively,showing that the development of behavior and linguistic mentality are equally important for children.Conceptual meaning of the coexistence is chiefly conveyed by symbolic and analytical process by the ratio of 45.2%and 34%respectively.That means children's thinking pattern experiences the transition from the concrete image intuition to the abstract logic thought in dealing with the concepts.Bright illumination makes up 69.3%while intimate social distance is 63.2%in interactive meaning,which illustrates the importance of organizing the meaningful teaching situation for the children's interaction between course contents and multimodality.In terms of the compositional meaning,multimode in separation accounts for 78.8%,while the ratio of highlighting information value between the given and the new information is in a large proportion of 94%by image.And 85.4%of the images are with highly salience in the textbook,which demonstrates that the vivid and intuitive image reveals information interaction.Meanwhile,the qualitative analysis illustrates the feasibility of the proposed multimodal analysis framework in the study.In summary,the primary school English textbook integrates multimodal elements like images and texts,which are in line with students,psychological characteristics in their cognition,to stimulate students' learning interests,to promote the interaction between the teacher and students,and to improve teaching effect and teaching quality.