scholarly journals A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Pictures in ELT Textbooks: Modes of Communication in Focus

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 623-644

There is a tight nexus between visual literacy and textbook picture representations. This is of paramount importance when textbooks in general and ELT textbooks, in particular, are under question. To conduct a visual and verbal discourse analysis based on modes of communication, ELT textbook pictures were analyzed under the assumption that visual and verbal discourse interacts with reflected modes of communication. To this end, 50 ELT textbook pictures were used as the corpus and analyzed according to KvL's (2006) visual images analytical strategies in multimodal texts and Halliday’s (1985) transitivity system for verbal analysis of textbook pictures. The analysis of multimodal resources revealed that the analyzed visual images were used to represent non-human images; close-up images, frontal images, left-right compositions were the most frequent visual modes in the selected pictures. In the case of verbal mode, the relational main-type and verbal minor-type level with 39% and 2% were the most and least frequent verbal strategies, respectively. The findings might have significant theoretical and pedagogical implications for scholars, L2 teachers, and ELT textbook designers to consider the potential of using multimodal resources for non-pedagogical purposes while integrating textbook visual images and verbal strategies to create meanings. Keywords: Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Transitive System’s Processes, Visual Images Interpretive Strategies, Modes of Communication, ELT Textbooks.

K ta Kita ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-100
Author(s):  
Wendy Cynthia Gunawan

Advertisement is an important business tool that enables companies to promote their products, as well as delivering a message. In this research, I use Nature Republic posters entitled “Soothing Gel” and “Soothing & Moisture Aloe Vera 90% Body”. I used qualitative approach in this research. Next, I use the theories of Multimodal Discourse Analysis for the first research question and Denotative and Connotative for the second research question. I aimed to discover what the meanings that are constructed through the visual images and how the meanings are supported by the written texts. Through the poster, Nature Republic is building the feelings of being beautiful, young, confident, natural, pure, and trustworthy to its consumers. In conclusion, Nature Republic is trying to make consumers believe in their products and deliver many values through its posters. Keywords: Advertisement, marketing, poster, multimodal discourse analysis, denotation, connotation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ton Nu My Nhat ◽  
Nguyen Thi Mi Pha

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.    


Author(s):  
Valentina Crestani

Sustainability is a fundamental concept of Alpine tourism in countries like Germany and Austria, which have signed the Alpine Convention, a treaty between Alpine countries and the EU. The following paper presents the main results of a multimodal discourse analysis conducted on selected online presentations of eco-friendly hotels in Austria and in Germany. The selection of this textual genre is due primarily to the fact that online presentations are a sort of gateway to introduce the reader into the world of tourism—a world that, at the pre-trip stage, is only virtual, becoming real in the ongoing-trip stage. Hotel presentations try to convince readers to go beyond the pre-trip stage and to choose the accommodation structure for the holiday. Austrian and German presentations use common verbal strategies, but they differ in the relationship between visual and verbal components.


10.29007/p8mm ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noelia Ruiz-Madrid ◽  
Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez

AbstractFrom a Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) perspective (Kress and Van Leuween, 2001; Kress, 2003; O’Halloran, 2004; Baldry&Thibault, 2006; Jewitt, 2009; Querol-Julián and Fortanet-Gómez, 2012) each semiotic resource (i.e., speech, image, writing, movement, gaze, sound, layout, among others) contributes to the meaning-making process. Linguistic and non-linguistic information is integrated in multimodal texts, and especially so in digital genres (Shepherd & Watters 1999; Crowston & Kwasnik 2004; Askehave & Nielsen 2005; Villanueva et al. 2008), where complex relationships are conveyed by the use of multiple resources.One of these new digital genres is the webinar or web seminar. Webinars help to disseminate knowledge, facilitate collaboration and communication, and enhance performance among students and instructors, employers and employees and specialist in dispersed locations (Wolf, 2006; Forrester, 2009; Bandy, 2010; Kokoc, Ozlu, Cimer & Karal, 2011). Its main characteristic is that it is online and it often consists of a number of lectures streamlined and/or recorded to be watched off-line, and there are several participants located in several places, who can contribute online or offline through different communication modes (written or spoken with or without video). In this sense, it is clear that webinars include a wide array of multimodal resources, both verbal and non-verbal. But how do they work together? To what extent are they integrated? Are users responsive to these multimodal resources and to what extent?In order to answer these and other questions, we analyse in this paper a dataset of several sessions of a research webinar organized by the Group for Research on Academic and Professional English in 2015 on the topic of Multimodal Discourse Analysis. Our interest is to study all the multimodal components in the discussion sessions in this seminar and the different strategies used by participants for online and face-to-face interaction.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 101
Author(s):  
Fuad Abdullah ◽  
Soni Tantan Tandiana ◽  
Yuyus Saputra

<div><p class="StyleABSTRAKenCambria">Recently, multimodality has attracted the attention of researchers, notably in the educational milieu. However, only a few studies reported on the way students perceived the use of Genre-Based Multimodal Texts Analysis (GBMTA) for teaching multimodality. After addressing the gap, this study focuses on students’ perceptions on the use of GBMTA in multimodality teaching in higher education. Sixty-nine students were involved in the study. Each of the students produced one journal through three meetings. The journals were then collected for document analysis and thematic analysis (Braun &amp; Clarke, 2006). The findings reveal that the students perceived GBMTA as facilitating them in the building of multimodal discourse analysis, challenges and solutions of comprehending multimodal teaching materials, planning better learning strategies in the future, engagement on multimodal learning issues, and multimodal text analysis practices. This study contributes to multimodality teaching or multimodal discourse analysis within genre-based learning.</p></div>


SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402110321
Author(s):  
Hesham Suleiman Alyousef

This qualitative study examined multimodal cohesive devices in English oral biology texts by eight high-achieving Saudi English-as-a-foreign-language students enrolled in a Bachelor of Science Dentistry program. A Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) of the textual and logical cohesive devices in oral biology texts was conducted, employing Halliday and Hasan’s cohesion analysis scheme. The findings showed that students used varied cohesive devices: lexical cohesion, followed by reference and conjunctions. Although ellipsis was minimally employed in the oral biology texts, its discipline-specific uses emerged: the use of bullet points and numbered lists that facilitate recall. The SF-MDA of cohesion in multimodal semiotic resources highlighted the processes underlying construction of conceptual and linguistic knowledge of cohesive devices in oral biology texts. The results indicate that oral biology discourse is interdisciplinary, including a number of subfields in biology. The SF-MDA of pictorial oral biology representations indicates that they include instances of cohesive devices that illustrate and complement verbal texts. The results indicate that undergraduate students need to be provided with a variety of multimodal high-cohesion texts so that they can successfully extend underlying conceptual and logical meaning-making relations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Marino

AbstractThis study aims to investigate the process of reconstruction of Māori postcolonial cultural identity in the twenty-first century which also passes through the reclamation and redefinition of ‘takatāpui’ notion. ‘Takatāpui’ is an umbrella term that nowadays indicates all the Māori with non-conforming wairua (spiritualities, gender identities), sexualities and sex characteristics. It is a culturally specific word which represents a form of intersectionality by identifying people as both Māori and queer.As a consequence of the increasing spread of the Internet, which has become a virtual place to construe identity and to promote the dissemination of ideas, a Multimodal Discourse Analysis is conducted on a corpus comprising 10 audiovisual texts fully retrieved from the web and exclusively produced by Māori takatāpui activists and/or containing Māori takatāpui activists’ self-narratives or claims.The corpus is analysed by applying a MMDA (Multimodal Discourse Analysis) framework based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s social semiotic framework (2006). The analysis is conducted also by taking into account Blommaert’s linguistic and ethnographic framework (2014).The findings of the analysis show the different strategies through which Māori identities are construed and conveyed reinforcing what the Māori scholar, Tuhiwai Smith (1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: Zed Books Limited, 28), calls “a very powerful need to give testimony to and restore a spirit, to bring back into existence a world fragmenting and dying”.


2021 ◽  
pp. 136754942110032
Author(s):  
Beatriz Carbajal-Carrera

Heroic narratives are often biased towards a conceptualization of the rural/urban difference that positions rural identities at the margins. In particular, superhero stories have traditionally offered a vision of heroism assumed to be male, urban and young. How can post-rural contexts shaped by migration contest these narrative patterns? This article examines the street narrative of Fenómenas do rural, which recognizes older female rural identities and casts them as superheroines. Through a multimodal discourse analysis, I examine its contestation of heroic patterns, its recognition of older female rural identities and its creation of affiliation opportunities for the Galician community. I argue that this narrative stands as a reflection of the rurban (rural + urban) and the glocal (global + local) elements that subverts pre-existing canons in the superhero and the meiga (‘witch’) mythology imaginaries.


Author(s):  
Shuting Cao ◽  
Rui Chen ◽  
Haiyuan Liu ◽  
Ruolin Shi

The main goal of college English education is to cultivate the students’ language ability of listening, speaking, reading and writing, and to promote the formation of individualized learning and autonomous ability of college students. At present, the new curriculum reform in our country has put forward a new educational requirement to college English teaching, which requires the innovation of college English teaching idea, and under the background of the development of new media, it proposes to use new media equipment to carry out teaching activities. However, college English education in our country is influenced by examination-oriented education mode, and the traditional education method is still used, which is not good for college students to improve their comprehensive quality of English. In view of this development situation, the Ministry of Education of China Based on the development of new media, a multimodal discourse analysis approach to college English education is proposed to enhance the level of College English teaching.


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