小学英语教材的多模态话语分析(2)

菜单

4.2.2 Framing 10

4.3 Proportion 10

5. Conclusion 12

6. References.....13

1. Introduction

This is the age of digital, this is the epoch of multimedia, and this is the season of internet technology. The persified channels to all the information are changing our attitude towards communication. People start to argue that verbal way is not supposed to be the only mode that delivers massage. In other words, meaning is always contained from at least two sign system or subsystems. So in the last decade of twenty contrary some researchers started to realize that pictures, sounds, and actions and so on all shared the characteristics of language, which was based on Halliday’ s Systemic Functional Linguistics theory and the social semiotics theory. Today we call it Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Based on Halliday’ s study, Multimodal Discourse Analysis considers the discourse as one block with its own meaning. Therefore every element: visual or verbal are all the essential elements in the meaning making progress. Furthermore, Multimodal Discourse Analysis also sucked up the system theory and register theory from the Social Functional Grammar. In the other words, Multimodal Discourse Analysis held the view that multimodal discourse has three meta functions in meaning making progress: ideational meta function, interpersonal meta-function and textual meta-function. In 1990s, after realizing that meaning structure is an complex activity in which not only the verbal mode but all the modes are supposed to be taken into concerned. Some researchers began to study the semiotic features of textbook discourse rather than its verbal context only. Kress and Van Leeuwen(1996) explored the visual resources by comparing two versions of high school textbooks. Their research drew a special attention to the usage of different kinds of visual material in the textbooks such as: photographs, tables, labels, icons. They found that from the version of 1930s to the recent version, there is an inclination, an inclination from verbal to visual. In other words, textbook designers started to realize the significance of visual and multimodality. 源^自·751|文\论]文'网[www.751com.cn

According to the development of textbook research in China, we can easily find the law. Guo(郭立波，2004：197-219) studied the multimodality in the biology textbooks. Scientific drawings, tables and graphs are the objects of his study. Chen(陈瑜敏，2008,2010) analyzed the ideational meaning of visual and meanwhile discussed the visual and verbal material of current Chinese textbooks. Zhang（张德禄，2011）investigated the compilation principles of foreign language textbooks with Multimodal characteristics by identify the constraining factors in foreign language textbook design. But as we can discover from above that very few of them study the English Textbooks for the primary school students. Not to mention the Multimodal Discourse Analysis of primary school textbooks. In the beginning part, the primary school English textbooks contain much more multimodal elements. Therefore, the writer chooses the primary school English textbooks of PEP edition as the data source of this study. Based on Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual grammar theory, this study made a simple description of the multimodality of this PEP edition Book 5

2. Literature Review

In 1952, Harris mentioned ”Discourse Analysis” for the first time. R．Barthes (1977), in his paper Rhetoric of the Image argued the relationship of visual and language in meaning construction. Though the discourse analysis had become a popular research questions in that period, scholars reached limited results because of its own shorts and limitations. Then along with the publishing of Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design written by Kress and Leeuwen (1996), a new term Multimodal Discourse Analysis shown up. Kress and Leeuwen discussed the role of images in education and concluded that “in terms of this new visual literacy, education produces illiterates” in the book (1996:15). They firstly used the concept of semiotic landscape, based on which they put forward a theory of reading images. In this study, scholars discussed the narrative and conceptual representations and their modalities in images. Based on Halliday’ s systematic functional grammar theory, “grammar” in Kress and Leeuwen’ s study is descriptive and at the same time universal. What’s more, in their study the visual elements discussed included oil paintings, magazine, comics, children’ s drawing, advertisements, and scientific diagrams. However, they only considered the static pictures in the textbook and forget the dynamic visuals like voice, radio and so on. Actually in this modern society with highly developed technology, textbooks are not only pages of paper, but also in various electronic forms such as CD, tapes. Therefore, in this paper, the writer are going to discuss the both written and electronic forms of visuals in the PEP textbooks.