A Comparative Study On Image-test Relations In China’s And Japan’s Senior High School English Textbooks

Against the backdrop of the information age,accompanied by the effect of multimodal communication,students’ reading habits and learning styles are gradually changing.With the addition of the skill of “seeing” in the English Curriculum Standard for Senior High Schools（2017 Edition）,teachers are required to pay attention to the role of visual resources in teaching when interpreting language resources.The continuous change of information form promotes the development of education towards digitization,multimedia and networking,so as to realize educational informatization.As Asian countries,China and Japan have similar cultural backgrounds,and both have published new high school English textbooks.Through a comparative study of the similarities and differences between the China’s Senior High School English Textbooks（People’s Education Edition）and Japan’s Senior High School English Textbooks（Crown Edition）in the setting of illustrations and the relation between photographs and texts,this thesis not only provides feasible suggestions for the compilation and improvement of multimodal discourse in China’s English textbooks,but also provides feasible suggestions for China’s high school English teachers to implement information-based teaching in teaching and the measures to cultivate students’ multidimensional reading ability.This study mainly adopts four research methods.Taking China’s Senior High School English Textbooks（1-3）and Japan’s Senior High School English Textbooks（1-3）as the research object,this thesis understands and analyzes the similarities and differences of graphic relationship between China’s and Japan’s senior high school English textbooks from multiple dimensions.Through literature review,the research framework is determined,and statistics and analysis are carried out from the perspectives of the number,degree of abstraction,organizational form and function of illustrations,the status relationship and logic-semantic relationship of image-text relations,so as to summarize their commonness and individuality,and further explore the problems and experience in the compilation of multimodal texts in teaching materials.The study finds that the two sets of textbooks have rich illustrations,bright colors and the selection of illustrations is authoritative.Compared with Japan’s textbooks,China pays more attention to the setting of independent illustrations and decentralized illustrations,with a more balanced distribution and a lively illustration style.The selection of illustrations fits the topics of students’ daily life and has various forms.The illustrations in the teaching materials are basically color illustrations,with few blackand-white illustrations.In terms of image-text relations,“image and text complement each other” accounts for 4.10% of the total,accounting for the lowest proportion,and“text more general” is the most frequently used in China’s textbooks,accounting for about one-third of the total.Based on the above research results,this study puts forward appropriate suggestions from the perspective of textbook editors and English teachers.