A Comparative Ecological Discourse Analysis Of Senior High School English Textbooks From The Perspective Of Appraisal System

The increasingly prominent ecological problems make ecological protection become the common mission of the world,and various disciplines have also ushered in the "ecological shift".It is against this background that ecolinguistics is developing rapidly,and the ecological discourse analysis framework from the perspective of SFL is the most mature.Meanwhile,the ecological analysis practice of different types of discourse is also developing continuously,and the ecological value of the discourse in politics,economy,culture and other fields has gradually attracted people’s attention.However,textbook writers’ understanding of the ecological value of textbooks needs to be further strengthened.Therefore,it is necessary to make an ecological discourse analysis of the mainstream textbooks to explore the ecological attitude conveyed by the textbook discourse,so as to realize the salience of the ecological value of the textbooks.In view of this,this paper takes the appraisal system in SFL and the ecological appraisal system(EAS)as the theoretical framework,takes "diversity and harmony,interaction and co-existence" as the ecosophy,and takes the complete texts in the required part of SHSE textbooks published by PEP and BNUP as the research data,in order to solve the following three research questions:(1)How are the appraisal resources of the two versions of senior high school English textbooks distributed and realized?(2)How are the ecological attributes reflected through the appraisal resources of the two versions of senior high school English textbooks?(3)What are the similarities and differences between the ecological ideas conveyed in the two versions of senior high school English textbooks in terms of human and self,human and nature,and human and society?To answer the above questions,the appraisal resources of the selected data were annotated and counted with the help of UAM Corpus Tool 6.2e.Then,based on the distribution of appraisal resources,the author explored the realization of the appraisal resources.Next,the appraisal resources were marked as eco-beneficial,eco-ambivalent and eco-destructive based on EAS and then the author exerpted the typical examples to make a specific analysis.Last,this study made a synthetic comparison of the ecological ideas conveyed by the two versions of senior high school English textbooks in terms of human and self,human and nature,and human and society,and discussed the possible factors that influence the ecological ideas conveyed.The results are as follows:(1)The appraisal resources used in the BNUP textbooks are generally more than those of PEP textbooks.With the distribution of attitude resources,the affect resources and appreciation resources in the two versions of textbooks make up the larger percentage,and the number of judgment resources rank the last.With the distribution of engagement resources,the two versions of textbooks mostly use the heteroglossic resources;with the distribution of graduation resources,the two versions of textbooks make more use of force resources.The realization of the appraisal resources of the two versions of textbooks is different according to the different thematic contexts,that is,the appraisal resources used in the two versions of textbooks have different methods of implementation in the three aspects of "human and self","human and nature" and "human and society".(2)Through answering the first question and based on EAS constructed by He Wei et al.,it can be found that the ecological attributes of the appraisal resources in the two versions of textbooks are mostly eco-beneficial.In terms of the ecological attributes of attitude resources,except for a few eco-beneficial and eco-destructive attitude resources about "human and nature",the rest are eco-beneficial attitude resources.About the ecological attributes of engagement resources,the existence of eco-ambivalent and eco-destructive engagement is the preparation of eco-beneficial engagement,aiming to highlight the eco-beneficial engagement content.With the ecological attributes of graduation resources,the graduation resources in the PEP textbooks are all eco-beneficial,and a small number of eco-ambivalent and eco-destructive graduation resources appear in the discourses about "human and nature" in the BNUP textbooks.(3)By answering the above two questions,it can be found that the ecological ideas conveyed by the two versions of textbooks in the three aspects of "human and self","human and nature" and "human and society" have both similarities and differences.Regarding the relationship between human and self,both versions of textbooks show that the contradiction between human and self often exists,but people should take the initiative to solve the contradiction and finally achieve harmony between human and self;but BNUP textbooks cover the lifestyles of different individuals,rather than sticking the subject to teenagers.In terms of the relationship between human and nature,both versions of textbooks show that humans play an important role in protecting the natural ecology.Nevertheless,PEP textbooks convey the eco-beneficial ideas more clearly than BNUP textbooks.Regarding the relationship between human and society,the two versions of textbooks both focus on the emotional value of social life,integrated development of social civilization and heroes’ social spirits.But there are some differences in the ecological ideas conveyed by the two versions of textbooks about "human and society" : PEP textbooks believe that humans have created and developed social civilization,and the sustainable existence of society requires the joint efforts of human beings;BNUP textbooks believe that various forms of social life enrich people’s spiritual world and make human beings more civilized.Through a comparative study of the compilation background of the two versions of textbooks,the author believes that the possible factors contributing to these similarities and differences include the guiding ideology,the scope of influence,and the content requirements of curriculum standards.This study attempts to make an ecological analysis of textbook discourse from the perspectives of SFL and ecolinguistics,which not only strongly verifies the superiority of the combination of SFL and ecolinguistics in empirical research,but also highlights the ecological values carried by textbook discourse.In addition,the synthetic comparison between these two versions of textbooks can provide some reference for the mutual improvement.