A Multimodal Discourse Analysis On Ideational Meaning Of Different Theme Contexts In New Senior English Textbook For China

The required English course of ordinary high school requires students to understand the meaning conveyed by visual resources rich in multimodal textbooks.Theme contexts,put forward by the New Curriculum Standard,provide meaningful context for language learning.At present,the number of studies that analyze textbooks from a thematic contextual perspective is increasing,but most of them focus on old textbooks and are text-only(unimodal).Therefore,to fill the gap,it is necessary to carry out multimodal discourse analysis on different theme contexts in multimodal textbooks.Based on Halliday’s Transitivity System,Kress & van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar and Martinec & Salway’s Image-text Relations,from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics,this study deploys multimodal discourse analysis in Compulsory 1,2 and 3 of the new Senior English Textbook for China(PEP)to compare the construction of ideational meaning and the image-text relation between the theme contexts of Human& Nature and Human & Society.Through the comprehensive and in-depth analysis,the ways of constructing ideational meaning in texts and images,and image-text relations under both contexts display similarities and differences respectively.Specifically,major findings indicate that:1)When constructing the ideational meaning in texts,both theme contexts show descriptive and narrative characteristics.The difference between the two contexts rests in that Human & Nature mostly depends on material process whereas Human & Society relies on both material and relational process.That is,narrating what happened in nature is mainly the learning requirement for high school students in passages under Human &Nature whereas narrating what happened to the world and judging,describing human contribution to the society are necessary in articles under Human & Society.2)While constructing the ideational meaning in images,conceptual representation plays a significant part under both contexts,with symbolical process occupying the biggest percentage,followed by classificational process and analytical process.The result implies both contexts try to make readers have the same or similar experience conveyed by images through symbolical process.The difference between the two contexts is that conceptual representation plays a bigger role in Human & Nature whereas narrative representation plays a more important part in Human & Society because employing a static way in Human & Nature helps readers better broaden their horizon whereas using a dynamic manner in Human & Society helps create a real dynamic learning context for readers.3)As for the logico-semantic relation of expansion,it nearly takes all of the relations under both contexts with elaboration and extension making a big difference whereas enhancement taking up little space.In terms of the differences between the two contexts,elaboration is more common in Human & Society than in Human & Nature,implying images often serve to make the corresponding texts more detailed,specific and comprehensible.Nevertheless,extension is more commonly seen in Human & Nature than in Human & Society,indicating language contents are more highlighted.This study has theoretical and practical values in providing guidance for teachers and students to fully understand and effectively utilize multimodal resources in textbooks,and giving references for developing textbooks as well as students’ multiliteracies.