A Study On Images Of Senior High School English Textbooks From The Perspective Of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

As information technology advances and the Internet plus era emerges,multimodal communication is gaining popularity and impacting traditional mindsets.The direct impact of this trend in education is the multimodality of textbook compilation.It is imperative in education and teaching to thoroughly grasp the multimodal features in textbooks and effectively identify the role of each mode in meaning construction.Beijing Normal University Press is one of China’s most authoritative and experienced publishers.Two modal resources,image and text,are the most common among the textbooks published by the press.They are both independent and closely related.Therefore,it is of great research value and significance to analyze textbooks from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis and deeply understand the multimodal resources and the process of meaning construction in textbooks.From the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis,based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar theory and Martinec and Salway’s Image-text Relations theory,this paper adopts a qualitative and quantitative research method to conduct multimodal discourse analysis with the BNUP senior high school English textbook in2019 as the corpus,so as to explore the distribution of the representational meaning,interactive meaning and composition meaning of the selected images in the textbook and the construction of different meanings in the images and the inter-semiotic relationship between integrated images and texts.In accordance with the findings of the study,first,BNUP English textbooks exhibit an obvious multimodal feature,with text interacting with images and text,and text and image blocks being clearly separated.Through the mutual cooperation of representational,interactive,and compositional meanings,the construction of image meaning in textbooks is achieved.Secondly,regarding the characteristics of image meaning construction,the textbook develops representational meaning by offering students knowledge and story examples.Constructing interactive meaning by offering images,flat shooting angles,and different social distances.Constructing compositional meaning through information values and invisible line frames of the middle-edge distribution type of images.Thirdly,regarding the construction characteristics of the meaning of images and texts,images and texts in textbooks are closely combined to participate in the construction of important meaning in multimodal discourse.As for status relationship,it shows the characteristics of image dependent on text and text-oriented.As for logical semantics,the image-text relationship is mutually expanded,with the elaboration and extension relationship prominent.This thesis focuses on the functions of image resources in high school English textbooks,and preliminarily discusses the general methods and principles of compiling image resources for foreign language textbooks,with a view to providing relevant suggestions for textbook users and textbook compilers.This study aims to assist textbook users in flexibly utilizing multimodal resources for teaching,and at the same time,it is recommended that textbook writers reasonably design and use various image resources.