‘Is the Picture Worth a Thousand Words?’: the Interpersonal Meanings of a Dialogue in an Efl Textbook

Abstract

This study was aimed at scrutinising a multimodal text embedded in a dialogue of an EFL textbook. To this end, Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) focused on interpersonal meanings consulting grammar of visual design and intersemiotic complementarity drawing on systemic functional linguistics were employed to analyse the artefact, a dialogue within a part named 'communication' taken from an EFL textbook for a primary school level. The findings revealed that declarative clause and modalisation (epistemic modality) of probability was found to be the most common system used in the verbal text. Meanwhile, high modality and validity were found in the visual image indicated by the realisations and representations of detailed abstraction and full-colour saturation. Finally, the study draws a conclusion that there is a cohesive interaction to a certain extent between the verbal text and the visual image represented in the multimodal dialogue.

An SFL perspective on EFL textbooks and its pedagogical implications in language teaching

“…They confirmed that SFL analysis could shed light on EFL textbooks' genre and register features, enabling teachers to design materials that reflect authentic language use in real-world contexts. Recent studies have also stressed the importance of incorporating multimodal texts in EFL textbooks (Montes, Barboza, & Olascoaga, 2014), integrating grammatical structures that support the ideational and interpersonal functions of the texts (Sugianto, Prasetyo, & Asti, (2022), considering the impact of SFL on language teaching (Rezeg, 2022;Zhang, 2017), and incorporating critical thinking elements within EFL textbooks (Wang, 2020). Collectively, these studies emphasize the significance of employing an SFL-based approach to evaluate and modify EFL textbooks, considering learners' diverse needs, and incorporating multimodal and critical thinking components.…”

“…Analyzing the use of nominal groupings enhances our comprehension of how language is organized and structured consistently and coherently within texts. The systemic functional features of SFL encompass language's ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions, offering a comprehensive framework for language analysis (Darong, 2022b;Tian, 2020;Sugianto et al, (2022). This framework could evaluate how language is utilized in EFL textbooks to convey meaning, create cohesion and coherence, and achieve specific communication goals.…”