A Comparative Study Of Image-text Relations In Go For It And New Standard English From The Perspective Of Multimodality

Studies about multimodality have received extensive attention since it emerged in 1990 s.As the major components of visual modality,images and texts have allowed researches on text-image relationship to be a focus in the field of multimodality.Textbooks are not only the carrier of language knowledge,but also the medium which can help teachers to achieve educational objectives and assist students in making progress.Language teachers and researchers have also attached great importance on images and texts,which are indispensable contituents of textbooks.As one of the most important means of imparting information and conveying meanings in textbooks,the combinations of text and image will directly affect the organization of knowledge,the utilization of educational resources,the quality of teaching as well as the efficiency of learning.However,researches on the image-text relations in English textbooks are few and awaiting to address.English textbooks are actually multimodal discourse as well which integrates rich texts and images.Secondary education is a transitional period for students to learn English.Therefore,a study on image-text relations in junior English textbooks will not only help discover the way in which images and texts are integrated,but help understand how knowledge is organized to enhance students’ ability in junior middle school language teaching materials.It will provide enlightenment on improving teachers’ and students’ ability to employ language learning resources,and thereby better promote teachers’ capability of teaching English and students’ ability to learn English,contributing to cultivating well-rounded talents consistent with the requirements of the Times.The thesis is designed to carry out a comparative study on image-text relations of two widely used junior English textbooks in China Go for It published by People’s Education Press in 2012 and New Standard English by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in 2012.The combination of quantitative analysis and qualitativeanalysis methods will be adopted to answer the following questions:1.What characteristics lie in the distribution of image-text relations in Go for It and New Standard English?2.How do image-text relations realize educational functions in Go for It and New Standard English?Research results are as follows:1.Four subsystems of relative status have all been exploited in Go for It and New Standard English and there is no obvious difference in their distributions.Both of them tend to use image subordination to construct knowledge in most cases,and the total percentage of their distributions are 58.15% and 52.73% respectively.Image-text complementary is the least used in Go for It and New Standard English which only reach 10.00% and 13.09% respectively.2.There is a significant difference in the distribution of logico-semantic relations between two sets of textbooks.In Go for It,extension is given first priority among expansion,accounting for 42.22% totally,and locution has a main position in projection,standing at 21.85%.While in New Standard English,elaboration serves as the dominant role among expansion,reaching 50.17% in total,and idea stands out in projection,accounting for 12.73%.3.Integration of image-text relations have been exploited to achieve different educational functions.Combinations of image-text independent and exposition tend to appear in words recognition and related exercises of lower grades to attract students’ attention and reduce learning burden so that they can recognize and remember vocabularies easily and happily.Image subordination combined with extension and enhancement is organized in reading passages from Grade 7 to Grade 9 to help students master the content of text,broaden knowledge and strengthen memory with the explanation and illustration of images.Image subordination and locution have been used to show language knowledge and teaching aims in Go for It,while image subordination and idea are related to cultivate students’ competence in logic thinking in New Standard English.Finally,to better understand the integration and utilization of multimodalresources in English language textbooks,two suggestions has been made: Firstly,further research could take audio modality of listening sections into account so as to have a further exploration on the integration of multimodal resources in English textbooks.Secondly,a contrastive multimodal study on English textbooks between some representative non-English speaking countries and our country could be conducted in order to reveal the similarities and differences in English textbooks on knowledge construction and students’ cultivation and offer a platform to learn from each other.