Textbook Genre Analysis From The Perspective Of Semantic Profiles

The steady push forward of education reform in China has generated vigor for education development.Over the past two years,new educational concepts have been popularized,new curriculum standards for high school were issued and the application of new high school textbooks is accelerating.Education has received more and more social and academic attentions.As a basic carrier of school education,textbooks directly influence the quality of students' cultivation.Therefore,the necessity and essence of textbook analysis have been adequately presented.Textbooks for elementary education not only include concentrated knowledge;they also reflect a country's national conditions and achieving the requirements and objectives in curriculum standards.As a genre,textbooks thereby convey predilections in their selected content.Among the five perspectives in Legitimation Code Theory –which explores the organizing principles of knowledge,Semantics can provide new paths to textbook genre analysis from lexicogrammar and semantics aspects.This thesis explores the generic features from the perspective of semantic profiles presented by epistemic-semantic density(ESD)of lexicogrammar and semantic density and semantic gravity(SD/SG)of text structures to deepen the understanding of textbooks and discourses.Reading materials of three literal genres – narrations,expositions and argumentation – are chosen from two sets of high school English textbooks(compulsory sections)published respectively by People's Education Press and Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in 2019.The study aims at providing novel ideas and methods for reading and writing activities in English classes generated from the results.Meanwhile,this study will endeavor to provide efficient and practical new paths for textbook developing,textbook evaluation,textbook genreanalysis and discourse analysis.The result indicates that,sharing the same educational objectives,reading materials of a same literal genre in high school English textbooks process some internal generic similarities in lexicogrammar and semantic structures.Among them,narrations have the weakest ESD wordings because they are mainly written in nuanced words and a few generalist consolidated words.Narrations have mild and steady SD/SG profiles which maintain at weak semantic density and strong semantic gravity.Expositions have the strongest ESD as they usually include all types of wordings and proper words appear the most frequently among the three literal genres.Their SD/SG profiles usually demonstrate a downward trend where semantic density decreases while semantic gravity increases.On the basis of common words,argumentation always employs a large amount of consolidated words,making its ESD relatively intermediate.It also maintains an intermediate level of SD/SG profile with some repeated patterns.The generic features of reading materials unearth the textual knowledge preference in high school English textbooks.Based on these results,this thesis provides some corresponding pedagogical paths for language expressing and thinking abilities cultivation in English reading and writing classes from semantic profile perspective.This paper also deems that semantic profiles will influence future textbook development and evaluation from the aspects of standards setting and content choosing.