An Ecological Discourse Analysis Of Reading Discourse In High School English Textbooks Under The Perspective Of Transitivity System ——Taking The Theme “Human And Nature ”in The NSE As An Example

Ecological discourse analysis is to explore the relationship and interaction between language and ecology,and thereby to reveal the impact of language on various ecological relationships（Huang,2017）.To achieve this goal,the analyst need to start with the structure and use of language,and to examine language systems,language structure and language use from an ecological perspective.Systemic functional linguistics focuses on describing and analyzing linguistic facts to construct reality.In view of this,this study is based on transitivity system in systemic functional linguistics,and takes the ecological sense of place that integrates traditional Chinese ecological philosophy and Western sense of place as the guiding ideology of the research.With the help of the UAM Corpus Tool,the reading texts on the themed “Human and Nature” in the“New Standard English” textbooks are marked,and then ecological discourse analysis is carried out to reveal the ecological ideologies conveyed in the texts.The purpose of this study is to address the following three questions:1.How is the transitivity system distributed in the Themed Human and Nature reading discourse in New Standard English? 2.What ecological discourse features are showed in the transitivity system of the Themed Human and Nature reading discourse in New Standard English?3.What ecological ideologies are revealed by analyzing the transitivity system in the Themed Human and Nature reading discourse in New Standard English?The study found that: First,the three components of the transitivity system are unevenly distributed in English textbooks.Participant roles account for the highest proportion（1572/45.29%）,followed by process types（1272/36.65%）,and environmental roles（627/18.06%）.In terms of distribution of participant roles,non-human participants（67.05%）are higher than human participants（32.95%）.Among them,the proportion of social participants and physical participants is almost the same and higher than other participants,which shows that English textbooks focus on describing non-human participants,especially social and physical participants.In terms of the distribution of transitivity processes,action process（550/43.24%）,relational process（368/28.93%）and mental process（224/17.61%）are most frequently used,which shows that these three components are important in the construction of the ecological thought of English textbook.Second,the transitivity system in the English textbooks of New Standard English reflects eco-beneficial discourse,eco-ambivalent discourse and eco-destructive discourse.Among them,eco-beneficial discourses account for the highest proportion（539/50.80%）,eco-ambivalent discourses rank the second place（463/43.64%）,and eco-destructive discourses account for the least（59/5.56%）.Third,the ecological thoughts embodied in the transitivity system in the textbooks New Standard English include eco-protective ideology,eco-ambivalent ideology and eco-destructive ideology.The idea of eco-protective ideology reflects people’s attitude towards environmental protection,the harmonious coexistence between human and nature,and their positive emotion,cognition or conation towards creatures and nature;the eco-ambivalent ideology reflects indifferent emotion,cognition or conation towards creatures and nature;the eco-destructive ideology reflects anthropocentrism and people’s negative emotion,cognition or conation towards creatures and nature.