A Multimodal Analysis Of Junior High School Physics Textbooks Published By People's Education Press

Textbooks are an important resource for students to acquire knowledge,and their multimodal features have been attracting increasing attention from scholars at home and abroad.In addition to using language,physics textbooks,for example,also employ a large number of illustrations to help students understand the basic structure of matter and the general laws of material movement.However,the characteristics of visual representations in physics textbooks and the image-text relations still lack systematic and in-depth investigation.Based on Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics as well as Kress and van Leeuwen's Visual Grammar,this project aims to analyze three junior high school physics textbooks published by People's Education Press(PEP).The analysis mainly include the examination of the visual representations from the three perspectives of classification,framing and formality and the investigation of the image-text relations so as to answer the following four main questions: 1)What is the profile of the images used in the junior high school physics textbooks(PEP edition)regarding classification,framing and formality? 2)What are the image-text relations in physics textbooks? 3)What are the similarities and differences in the multimodal design of physics textbooks at different learning stages? 4)What teaching and learning implications can be drawn from the multimodal analysis of junior high school physics textbooks?The multimodal analysis of physics textbooks makes the following three main findings: 1)Overall,the junior high school physics textbooks(PEP edition)feature moderate classification,moderate framing,and low formality.2)The image-text relations in the physics textbooks are mainly repetition and synonymy.3)The physics textbooks of eighth and ninth grades share similar multimodal design in terms of framing and formality.However,the visual representations in the eighth-grade textbooks have weaker classification than that in the ninth grade textbooks and thus presents scientific knowledge in a way similar to everyday experience.This study has three main implications for teaching and learning physics: 1)Teachers should use the multimodal characteristics of physics textbooks to increase students' enthusiasm for participating in the classroom.2)An equal relationship with the teaching materials can help students learn disciplinary knowledge more efficiently.3)The analytical frameworks for multimodal representations provide textbook compilers with useful tools to select different types of pictures at an appropriate ratio and optimize the image-text relations.