The present panorama of communication features the co-employment of language and other semiotic resources. This paper addresses this fledging field, multimodal discourse analysis, by investigating a genre targeted at children. Specifically, it studies how meanings in comics for children are constructed both verbally and visually. The data for the study is one comic - Little Red Riding Hood, which is presented via colored images and verbal texts in English. The analysis was based on Unsworth’s (2006) framework to explore the interplay of the two semiotics in the construction of the ideational contents. The results reveal that this comic displays both Expansion and Projection relations with nearly equal occurrence frequencies; however, within each type, the subtypes are vastly different with Verbal being the most predominant, which can be deemed as one of the typical features of the genre in focus. Regarding Expansion, Concurrence and Complementarity have nearly the same high percentage while Enhancement has a lower proportion. Theoretically, the findings concerning a complete full-length comic contribute to the literature on multimodal texts for young learners. The findings also have practical implications for the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language as to how to exploit the free online kid-targeted multimodal resources to engage the young learners in literary works in general and to develop their English proficiency in particular.

Ever since Swales ' (1981/1990) work on the research article (RA), this genre has been subject to copious investigation in the past three decades. This attraction is due to both its highly valued status as a means of disseminating academic knowledge and the high pressure on part of the university staff and PhD students to have publications in international journals in many countries where English is not a native language. This paper reviews the literature on genre/move-based investigations into writing for international publication. The three areas of focus are the rhetorical structures, the linguistics features, and the cross-cultural comparisons of these two aspects. The synthesis provides a detailed account of both consistencies and inconsistencies to the conventional structures, as well as of the similarities and differences in the linguistic realizations, across various disciplines and cultures. **

Abstract:Of multiple discourses where the Vietnamese young learners are increasingly engaged to develop their English proficiency, English mathematical discourse (MD) has proved to be more and more popular. This paper explores the materials in this realm from multisemiotic perspective. In particular, it deals with two questions: (1) to what extent each of the three semiotic resources -language, visual images and mathematical symbolism -is represented in the materials of learning mathematics in English (ME) developed for young learners (YL) and (2) how many words the YLs need to know to comprehend the language component of these materials. Data for illustrations and discussions are withdrawn from the printed resources currently accessible in the Vietnamese context. The results offer insights into the functions of other resources in constructing meanings apart from the well-established role of language as well as the vocabulary load of these materials. The paper concludes with a discussion of pedagogical significance of this study for material designers, teachers and learners and implications for further research.

The present paper contributes to the increasing investigation into the lexico-grammatical features of the English-medium research articles (RAs). The study investigated the use of modality in the RAs both as a whole and across the sections, and compared these features between two subsets - RAs from an internationally established journal and those from a non-indexed journal published in Vietnam. Data for the study was 30 RAs over a three-year time span from 2017 to 2019 from English for Specific Purposes and VNU Journal of Foreign Studies. The findings indicate a small disproportion in the frequency between these two groups of authors, with the international subset having a slightly higher normalized frequency. Modality distribution across sections suggests the same decreasing order for both subsets, which starts from Conclusion to Results and Discussion, Literature review, Introduction and ends with Method, with Conclusion being the section with the highest frequency, and Method with the lowest. Additionally, the international subset consistently has a slightly higher normalized frequency in all sections than that in the Vietnamese subset. It is expected that the issues unfolded from this study could theoretically contribute to a better understanding of modality in research papers in general and in those in the discipline of Applied Linguistics in particular; practically, the thesis is also hoped to promote the Vietnamese researchers in their endeavor to join the international academic community.

This paper aims to investigate the epistemic markers in TED talks. The data for the study is 100 TED talks on education. The mixed method of both the quantitative and qualitative approaches was manipulated to capture the use of the linguistic means to convey epistemic modality in terms of degrees of certainty and range of devices. The findings indicate that epistemic modality is pervasive in this genre, with approximately one-tenth of the sentences in the data being epistemically modalized by TED speakers via a range of linguistic means of different types and epistemic strength. The analysis unveils a clear tendency to select the middle level of commitment and make use of epistemic modal auxiliaries to frame their statements with personal attitudes and opinions. The examination of epistemic devices in the data also suggests speakers’ preference to use epistemic adverbials to realize certainty and employ epistemic modals to denote probability and possibility. The study yields pedagogical implications for developing an efficient use of epistemic modality in oral presentation of academic discourse.