A Multimodal Study On Senior High School English Textbooks New Senior English For China And Advance With English

English textbooks as an important tool in English teaching and learning greatly affect learners' second language acquisition.Researchers at home and abroad studied textbooks from different aspects including theoretical basis,cultural orientation and research methods.On the other hand,multimodality in textbooks plays a critical role in conveying meanings,which becomes a hot topic in recent years.Therefore,this study focuses on the multimodal discourse analysis of English textbooks to explore the image-text relations in China's high school English textbooks and its effects on second language acquisition.On the basis of image-text relations(Martinec & Salway 2005),this study takes the latest version of two high school English textbooks New Senior English for China(NSEC)and Advance with English(AE)as research subjects to answer the following three questions.(1)What are the relative status relations of the images and the texts in two textbooks?(2)What are the logico-semantics relations of the images and the texts in the textbooks?(3)How do the image-text relations affect second language acquisition?This study has a multimodal discourse analysis on the “Reading and Thinking”sections in the latest version of NSEC and “Reading” in the latest version of AE.Then,with the data collected,it analyzes the image-text relations of the two textbooks and explores their effects on second language acquisition with the use of Excel 2003.The major findings are as follows: 1)In relative status relations in NSEC,four types of relations occur taking different percentage with independent relations being a major part and complementary relations taking the least portion.Moreover,some books show no text-subordination relations.When it comes to the relative status relations in AE,very similarly,four types of relative status relations are discovered.We find that image-subordination takes the largest portion and text-subordination relations the least.Moreover,an even distribution occurs when it comes to theindependent relations and complementary relations.Last but not least,in comparing the relative status relations of the two textbooks,the complementary relations in NESC elicit an overall growing tendency,and the image-subordination relations and text-subordination relations in AE exhibit opposite trends.Moreover,independent and image-subordination relations take a predominant part leaving a huge gap to complementary and text-subordination relations.2)As for the logico-semantics relations in NESC,seven types of relations are found.The relations are categorized into four parts.When it comes to AE,six types of relations are discovered,divided into two categories.In AE,the status for extension and elaboration relations is complementarily fluctuated and the relations with extension and enhancement take half of the total relations.In addition,in comparing the logico-semantics relations in the two series,most of the books in NESC share a similarity in their distribution of the relations,and elaboration,extension and their combination rank the largest three parts in the textbooks;projection and enhancement relations are hardly to be noticed.3)In studying image-text relations effects on second language acquisition,we find that image-text relations facilitate second language acquisition by impacting input enhancement,reinforcing visual learning system,facilitating incidental acquisition,developing students learning skills including metalanguage proficiency,establishing a better understanding of the meaning and improving students learning motivation.Accordingly,for the sake of cultivation of mutiliteracies,teachers in EFL classes are encouraged to make a good use of modes of images and texts and the image-text relations.This study enriches research on the multimodal characteristics of English textbooks image-text relations and further clarifies a linguistic view that different modes interact to construct meaning.It also provides some pedagogical implications to English multimodal teaching and learning.Due to limitation of time,this study only analyzes the reading sections of the textbooks.