A Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Senior High English

In this era of information explosion,people usually receive diverse information by texts,audio,images,videos,web pages and so on.It has become widespread that different semiotic resources cooperate with each other to build meanings,which affects people?s thinking and living.In other words,people have entered into a multimodal society.As an important medium,the textbook also increasingly becomes multimodal that texts are no longer the only way to present knowledge;pictures,audio,colors,typography and animations are exerting a profound influence on the form and function of textbooks.After reviewing the previous studies,the author finds that multimodal studies have been carried out in all aspects of life,including the textbook discourse.However,the analysis of English textbooks is still rare.Therefore,it is necessary to analyze English textbooks from the perspective of multimodality.In this study,the multimodal theories including Visual Grammar of Kress & van Leeuvan and Royce?s Intersemiotic Complementarity are used to analyze the images and texts in Senior high English by the qualitative and quantitative analysis method.And the data in this paper are collected from 5 compulsory textbooks in Senior High English.First of all,the author collects totally 456 images and 311 texts according to Jones?s content analysis method.Then,the data is analyzed in two stages.The first stage carries on the exhaustive analysis of the 456 images according to Visual Grammar so as to explore how the images construct the visual meanings.After that,it probes into the characteristics of processes used to realize the three meanings.In the second stage,the semantic complementarity between texts and images and its characteristics are further studied under the framework of Royce?s Intersemiotic Complementarity.The results show that the images in Senior High English fully realize the three visual meanings and work together with the texts to build meanings.Firstly,in terms of the representational meaning,the narrative presentation is the main tool,which describes the occurrence or course of events by vectors.It can mobilize the viewer?s knowledge to efficiently obtain text-related information.The protruding processes are the actional process and the reactional process.In terms of interactive meaning,the images mainly rely on offer contact,social distance,frontal and equal perspectives.These are designed to establish a friendly relationship between images and viewers,which can enhance the effects of images.Secondly,in terms of compositional meaning,the image positions are relatively flexible,mainly depending on the texts,and then the information value changes accordingly,because the images are subordinate to the texts and play a supporting role in the construction of meanings.At the same time,the images are not in the central position to highlight the significance.As for framing,separation,overlap and integration are the most common devices,emphasizing the integrity of textbooks.Thirdly,collocation is the most prominent type in the semantic complementarity between images and texts,which reflects a feature of these textbooks.That is there are a large number of activities,such as listening,writing,oral training and so on.Images coordinate with texts to promote the smooth progress of activities and help students improve their abilities.In addition,repetition and synonymy are also very common,which can make the images and texts complement and reinforce each other and help students understand the content of textbooks more easily.However,antonymy is rarely used because it increases the burden of understanding and thus hinders the acquisition of knowledge.The multimodal discourse analysis of Senior High Englsih is designed to arouse teachers? attention to the images,texts and the complementary relationship between them,hoping teachers can make full use of the multimodal resources to enhance the teaching effect and stimulate students? interest in learning so as to achieve the teaching goals and improve students? multiliteracy more effectively.What?s more,this study also has the significance for the textbook compilers.To be specific,the arrangement of images and texts should conform to the students? cognition characteristics and the textbook function.