A Multimodal Analysis From Perspectives Of Visual Grammar And Image-Text Relation

With the rapid development of modern multimedia technology,textbooks used by students have changed tremendously and more and more semiotic resources appear in textbooks,therefore multimodal discourse is formed.Two aspects on how multimodal resources in textbooks constructing textual meaning of textbooks and on how to utilize the multimodal resources in textbooks for better teaching activities are the significance of this thesis.Curriculum provision in China attaches great importance to senior high school,which is the crucial period for English study.On the one hand,senior high school consolidates the knowledge points learned in primary and junior high school,and on the other hand,senior high school lays a solid foundation for English study in college.In curriculum provision,the reading part is the very important one of English textbook in P.E.P.version and embodies teaching objectives and important knowledge points,therefore the full utilization of construction meaning of different modes in English textbook contributes to the better efficiency of reading comprehension.Based on Visual Grammar by Kress&Leeuwen(2006)and Text-Image Relation by Martinec&Salway(2005),this thesis makes multimodal discourse analysis of selected English textbook.54 reading materials from general senior high school curriculum standards experimental textbook published in 2010(five compulsory ones and six elective ones,11 in total)in P.E.P.version are the object of study.This thesis makes multimodal discourse analysis from three aspects,that is,the metafunctional significance of image construction,the status between image and text,and the logic-semantic relation between image and text so that students have a clear understanding of how multimodal resources in textbooks constructing textual meaning of English textbook and they can have a more comprehensive and effective way to learn English.The author designs the questionnaire of multiliteracy of senior high English textbook in P.E.P.version and finds out that students' multiliteracy is rather low in general.Therefore,by the combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis,this thesis displays three aspects about multimodal discourse meaning of image-text construction in reading part of English textbook in P.E.P.version.The first is the metafunctional significance of image,most images in reading part belong to narrative representation and more than half of the images convey certain movements or present interpersonal communication to the readers.The second is about the status of image and text,most images are subordinate to the text,and the reading parts of senior high English textbook in P.E.P.version put more emphasis on texts so that images are in subordinate place.The third shows that image in the logic-semantic relation of image and text is more efficient than text to text in generality,and text is better than to image in displaying more concrete contents.By this research,teachers should take full advantage of constructive meaning of different modes in English textbook for English teaching so that better teaching result can be achieved.As for students,they should make use of multimodal features to develop their multiliteracy.The editors of English textbook should utilize various image-text relation to better design and edit English textbook.