Multimodal Discourse Analysis Of Junior New Concept English Textbook

The rapid development of Internet has greatly changed people's life.The living world presents more and more multimodal characteristics.With the help of the digital technology,textbooks,which is an important medium for people to know the world and learn the knowledge,are becoming more and more “three-dimensional” and “multimodal”.It inevitably requires us to change the traditional way of learning in order to improve the ability to deal with the huge amounts of multimodal knowledge pouring into our head.As a new edition of the new concept English textbook,Junior new concept English has more than one thousand images in the whole set of the textbooks,which makes it one of the representatives of “multimodal textbooks” in the modern time.It has a great research value for both the users and the editors if knowing what the characteristics of these multimodal resources are and what information they can convey in the textbooks.Based on Kress and Van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar and Martine and Salway's analysis framework of relations between image and text,this study uses the quantitative and qualitative methods to do the multimodal discourse analysis of these more than 1300 images and related text resources in all these 6 Junior new concept English textbooks,from the perspective of visual images' three meta-functional meaning construction,status of images and text,and logico-semantic relations of images and text.The main findings of this study are as follows: firstly,most of the images in these textbooks fully reflect the representational meaning,interactive meaning and compositional meaning of visual grammar.In terms of representational meaning,narrative representation accounts more.In terms of interactive meaning,offer is the main interactive relationship compared with demand,medium shot is the main social distance meaning representation,and the visual angle of pictures mostly adopts the form of front and plane angle,which is helpful to narrate the story and promote the learners' participation,while the number of oblique,high and low angle pictures are small,which reflects the communicative and narrative features of the textbooks.Secondly,in the analysis of the relationship between the two modes of images and text,the proportion of complementary mode accounts more,which shows that the image mode and text mode are equally important in the meaning representation in the text.Among the logico-semantic relations between images and text,the elaboration relations occupy the highest proportion.The study plays a guiding role in improving the students' ability of multi-literacy,and gives some reasonable suggestions on how to use and edit the multimodal resources in the textbook compilation.