Interpersonal Meaning in Multimodal English Textbooks

Exploring multimodality in English language teaching textbooks, this book focusses on how language and image are co-deployed within these resources in order to create and convey interpersonal meaning. Presenting cutting-edge research in appraisal studies and multimodal discourse analysis, Yumin Chen uses systemic functional linguistics and social semiotics to investigate how different voices are introduced and aligned inter-modally in textbooks, extending the appraisal systems of engagement and graduation across language and image. The book also demonstrates how linguistic and visual semiotic resources co-instantiate attitude, paying special attention to the attitudinal dimension of curriculum goals for school students of different ages. Furthermore, it examines how different kinds of coding orientation are deployed in various educational contexts and different constituent genres.

Demonstrating how the linguistic and semiotic theories can be adapted to analyze multimodal texts across language and image, Interpersonal Meaning in Multimodal English Textbooks offers new perspectives on how to employ multimodal resources to enhance the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language.

J. R. Martin is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, Australia. The Martin Centre for Appliable Linguistics was opened by Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2014.