PhD Thesis Proposal.docVIP

Interpersonal Meaning in English Textbook Discourse: A Multisemiotic Approach CHEN Yumin（陈瑜敏） School of Foreign Languages Sun Yat-sen University Introduction We now live in a fast changing world, in which multiple modes of communication (e.g. verbal, visual, audio, spatial, gestural, etc.) enabled by the latest development of multimedia and computing technologies, often function simultaneously in printed matters, on computer screens and performance stages. Accordingly people’s modes of thinking and ways of learning have experienced noteworthy changes, and the concept of ‘Multiliteracies’ has emerged and attracted scholarly attention. Substantial studies have been carried out both from the perspective of multimediated literacy and in the dimension of cultural and linguistic diversity. To avoid too many foci, our present research concentrates on Multiliteracies in the sense of multimediated literacy, and discusses the verbal texts and visual images in textbook discourse among many other multimodal teaching and learning resources. Nowadays in China, most students in primary and secondary schools were born in the late 1980s or even 1990s. They are practically and extensively engaged with multisemiotic modes of communication both within and outside their classrooms, which has become a widely–voiced concern among educationists (Fu 2005). A pedagogy that enables multimediated literacy practices will at least complement, if not replace, the traditional language-based pedagogy. The issue of textbook editing has frequently been put on the agenda of the educational reform in China. However, given the numerous studies on curriculum design, textbook editing and teaching methodology, it is surprising that, to date, the multisemiotic nature of contemporary textbooks currently used in China has been relatively unexplored, which explains in part the necessity of the proposed research topic. The focus of the present study is on the interpersonal management in textbook disc