A comparative study on multimodal analysis of junior secondary English textbooks used in Shenzhen and Hong Kong

Abstract

There is a growing adoption of visual semiotic resources, which are considered as instruments to elicit teaching content to reading, in English textbooks in recent decades (Jewitt, 2009). In this study, all visual images (n=68) in key reading passages (n=27) in Shenzhen English Textbooks (SZT) and New Treasure Plus (NTP), applied in Shenzhen and Hong Kong respectively, were analyzed. Such comparative multimodal research remains an unexplored area because many multimodal comparisons have been undertaken to examine the textbooks used in other areas rather than Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Furthermore, substantial studies were conducted to analyze the visuals in Science and Mathematics textbooks instead of English textbooks (Nugroho, 2010; von Zeipel, 2015). A three-stage analysis was conducted to investigate the multimodality of SZT and NTP. Firstly, context of situation of every written text was investigated to present a general understanding of the reading passages. Secondly, representational, interactive, and compositional meanings construed by visual images were analyzed using the framework of Visual Grammar (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). Thirdly, the image-text relations between every written text and its accompanying images were interpreted. The analytical results showed remarkable agreement in terms of context of situation, the distribution of contact and perspectives, and image-text relations. There are significant differences between SZT and NTP in aspects of representational meanings, size of frame, and layouts. The significance of the study is to raise the awareness of the textbook publishers about the imperfect aspects of their textbooks and provide suggestions for English teachers on how to deal with such imperfectness (e.g. the absence of Expounding Process) and learn from the reasonable patterns (e.g. the use of frontal and eye-level perspectives).