Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of The Reading Part Of PEP Junior High School English Textbooks

English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2011)indicates that English textbooks are the core of English curriculum resources.With the development of multimedia,the contents of textbooks have changed profoundly,showing the remarkable multimodal characteristics.As an important part of the contents of textbooks,pictures enable learners to easily train their skills of analysis,observation and imagination,enrich their learning contents,foster their aesthetic sentiment,and advance their body and mind quality.However,the domestic study on multimodal discourse analysis of PEP junior high school English textbooks is insufficient at present.For teachers' better understanding and use of textbooks and to cultivate learners' multiliteracy,the multimodal discourse analysis of the Reading part of PEP junior high school English textbooks is carried out in this study.The analyze method is base on Kress and van Leeuwen's visual grammar and Royce's ideational inter-semiotic complementarity,which are developed from Halliday's systemic-functional linguistics.With the using of literature research and text analysis method,according to the multimodal analysis of the Reading part of the PEP junior high school English textbooks,this study aims to explore the following questions:(1)How do pictures of the Reading part of PEP junior high school English textbooks embody the three meanings of the visual grammar?(2)How do pictures and texts of the Reading part of PEP junior high school English textbooks embody the complementary relationship?Through the text analysis of textbooks,the results indicates that:(1)The pictures of the Reading part of PEP junior high school English textbooks fully reflect the representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning of visual grammar.In terms of representational meaning,narrative representation is the main process.In terms of interactive meaning,offer is the main interactive relationship,close range is the main social distance,and the visual angle of pictures mostly adopts the form of front and plane,which is more conducive to presenting information to readers and making it easier for readers to experience the intimate and equal relationship.In terms of compositional meaning,the information value is mainly reflected in the fact that the pictures of textbooks in the right side express new information,specifically,those in the top right express new ideal information,and those in the bottom right express new real information.The significance of pictures is reflected in the fact that the size of pictures is appropriate,they have high clarity,color saturation and tonal value,and the background of pictures serves as a foil to their foreground.Besides,the frame of pictures is composed of lines,separating the pictures from the texts,enhancing the independence and individuality between pictures and texts,for easily distinguishing,and help readers gain a better understanding of the subject matter.(2)The relationship between pictures and texts of the Reading part of PEP junior high school English textbooks is clear complementary,which is mainly manifested as repetition relationship,followed by collocation relationship,synonymy relationship,meronymy relationship and hyponymy relationship,without antonymy relationship.This indicates that the pictures in the textbooks are not randomly selected,but closely related to the texts.Based on the above conclusions,this study puts forward relevant suggestions from the perspectives of teachers and textbook developers.On the one hand,it can facilitate teachers to better understand and use multimodal resources in English textbooks.On the other hand,it can help textbook developers to design teaching materials more reasonably with multimodal resources.