A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of PEP Version Of Senior High School English Textbooks

With the development of information and multimedia technology,the compilation of textbooks also changes from a single text modality to a multi-modal form.These various modes and symbols all play an important role in the textbooks"comprehensive meaning construction.Although the analysis of English textbooks has always been attached much emphasis by researchers,the analysis of it from a multi-modal perspective is rare.This study believes that it is necessary to proceed a continual research on this aspect.Based on Systematic Functional Grammar,Visual Grammar and image-text relationship theory,this study uses the Workbook part of PEP version of high school English textbooks as corpus to explore the representation and distribution of the modalities in this part,their way of constructing discourse meaning and their image-text relations of this part as well as the high school students' view on the multimodality and disadvantages of textbooks.Through comprehensive and in-depth analysis,the findings of this thesis can be concluded as the following points.First,the image modality is evenly distributed in each module but unevenly distributed in each plate,which shows that the listening part has the most images,then the reading part,and the writing is the least.And pictures,drawings and tables are used most frequently.Second,the layout and font setting of this part is unvaried,but it has clear arrangement,upright font and harmonious color.As for the representational meaning of images,in narrative representation,most pictures belong to action process and reaction process.In conceptual representation,most images belong to classification process.Besides,most images can express interactive meaning by providing or demanding information and realize compositional meaning by represented participants'salience and framing of the pictures.Third,as to image-text relation,the number of unequal status images is far greater than the number of equal status pictures.In the logical semantic relation,there is far more image exemplification than text exemplification.They all manifest that the Workbook part is mainly based on the text and the figure plays an auxiliary role.Fourth,most students accept the application of multimodal resources in the English textbooks and have the awareness of using multi-modal resources but their utilization is low.In addition,there also exist some problems in resources distribution and image-text collocation of the textbooks,which need further adjustment and improvement.This research has the theoretical and practical value of providing teachers and students with full understanding and effective use of multimodal resources of textbooks,giving references for developing textbooks and cultivating students'multiliteracy.