A Survey On The Use Of The Textbook Illustrations In Senior High School English Teaching

As an essential part of teaching materials,illustrations are important teaching resources and play an important role in teaching.They can cultivate students’observation,analysis,and comprehension abilities,improve students’ interest in learning,and keep their attention,etc.With the development of multimedia teaching,textbook illustrations show a multimodal trend.In addition to pictures,illustrations in the form of videos have been added,which is also a multimodal discourse.The English Curriculum Standards for General Senior High Schools(2017 Edition 2020 Revised Edition)states that English textbooks are the core of the English curriculum resources,and that adds the skill of “viewing” to the previous skills of listening,speaking,reading,and writing,which also reflects the important role of textbook illustrations and requires teachers to pay attention to developing this skill for students.This study uses Multimodal Discourse Analysis Theory and Dual Coding Theory as the theoretical base.It takes some teachers and students of a senior high school in Nanning as the research subjects and the illustrations in the required PEP Senior High School English Textbooks(2019 Edition)as an example.Using the questionnaire,classroom observation and interview,the author investigated and studied the use of illustrations in senior high school English textbooks.The aim is to put forward some feasible suggestions on using textbook illustrations to improve teachers’ attention to illustration-assisted teaching.This study focuses on four research questions:(1)What are the general characteristics of the illustrations in the required PEP Senior High School English Textbooks(2019 Edition)?(2)How do students use the textbook illustrations?(3)How do the teachers use the textbook illustrations?(4)What are the main factors that influence teachers and students to use the textbook illustrations?The study shows that(1)the number of illustrations in the required PEP Senior High School English Textbooks(2019 Edition)is large and mainly colorful,and the facilitation is the main function of the illustrations.(2)Students use the textbook illustrations to predict the text content before class and use them to understand the relevant text during class,which improve their English learning effect.During use,the students are interested in the color and classifications of illustrations.Students mainly use textbook illustrations in a viewing and illustrative way.However,some students have to use the textbook illustrations only under the guidance of the teacher.(3)Teachers mostly use textbook illustrations in reading lessons,followed by listening and writing lessons.The illustrations are mainly used in the lead-in stage.The illustrations are mainly presented by multimedia.Teachers use textbook illustrations to stimulate students’ interest in learning,reduce the learning difficulty and enliven the classroom atmosphere.However,illustrations are less frequently used in grammar lessons and other teaching stages.(4)The main factors that influence students’ use of textbook illustrations are students’ weak awareness of using illustrations,students’ enjoyment of textbook illustrations,teachers’ low frequency of using textbook illustrations,and the color of illustrations.The main factors affecting teachers’ use of textbook illustrations are the single way of presenting illustrations,use of illustrations in a fixed lesson type,students’ comprehension ability and the insufficient number of illustrations.Based on the results of this study,there are some suggestions.(1)Teachers should actively enhance students’ awareness of observing textbook illustrations.(2)Teachers need to add up-to-date illustrations based on textbooks.(3)Teachers need to increase their research and learning of strategies for using illustrations.(4)Teachers should make full use of the textbook illustrations.