Exploring the Multimodality of EFL Textbooks for Chinese College Students: A Comparative Study

Abstract

To explore the multimodality of two representative EFL textbook series for Chinese college students, their visual and verbal semiotic modes were compared. The target textbooks are Experiencing English and New Century College English. Through multimodal discourse analysis, the study aims to shed some light on how to develop high-quality multimodal EFL textbooks. The main findings are: (1) EE and NCCE are similar in the fact that their representative multimodal texts are visually-verbally coherent and both demonstrate prominent features for intersemiotic semantic relations; (2) their differences are EE displays a higher degree of interpersonal intersemiotic complementarity and multimodality facilitates the realization of different modern educational concepts — constructivism in EE and humanism in NCCE; and (3) such differences are related to or may partially result from the differences in the language difficulty of textbooks and English proficiency of target learners. As a pioneering attempt to probe into the possible relationship between multimodality and modern educational concepts in EFL textbooks, the study shows the importance of properly arranging the different modes in a double-page spread. It also suggests that EFL textbook compilers consider the learners’ English proficiency and appropriately employ the variety and number of multimodal resources to achieve optimal intersemiotic complementarity.

Image-Text Relation Interpretation: Teachers’ Visual-Verbal Competence in Teaching Texts

“…Moreover, the teachers' preference to use pictures as provided in the textbook is also responded by researchers, proven by any studies in EFL teaching context focusing on analysing images in the textbook seen from any angle (da Costa & de Barros, 2012;Hermawan & Rahyono, 2019;Liu & Qu, 2014). Their studies implicitly show that teachers now days still gain the textbook as a good and practical alternative to use in the teaching texts.…”

Multimodal Writing to Promote Global Competence for EFL Learners

“…The inextricable bound between learning and multimodality has been demonstrated by cognitivists since 1970 (Liu & Qu, 2014) and in 1996, the New London Group introduces 'multiliteracies pedagogy'. Accordingly, it suggests that multimodality is important for meaning-making since it includes different modes including linguistic, audio, spatial, gestural and visual designs.…”

Multimodality in English-Indonesian Intersemiotic Translation

“…Therefore, gestures play several communicative functions in a conversation. It can function to repeat, give accents, show opposition, complement, or modify messages delivered verbally (Liu et al [3]). Although conversation gestures can involve body parts, gestures which play important roles in conveying meaning are arm and hand movements.…”

“…Ajayi [1], for example, examined the way teachers deploy multimodal textbooks to improve the quality of language learning; Choi and Jooi [2] examined the integration of the multimodality concepts in the practice of language learning. Liu et al [3] compared the multimodality aspects in English textbooks while Ruan [4] examined the role of multimodal aspects in learning listening and multiliteracy skills. Meanwhile, Souzandehfar et al [5] questioned the importance of multimodality/multiliteracies in the process of meaning making.…”