Analysis of the representational meaning and status relation in the Chinese teaching materials: Implications for language teaching

• Main Author: Liu, Ziqi
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2023
• Subjects: Discourse analysis; English language—Textbooks for foreign speakers; Chinese language > Teaching > Aids and devices; Education
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdm_deal/16; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/etdm_deal/article/1014/viewcontent/2023_Liu_CompleteVersionETD.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

The emergence of a discourse community has accompanied the growing trend of Filipino students enrolling in schools that offer Chinese courses. In textbooks, text mode is no longer the only one, but appears together with the multimodal modes such as audio and visual modes. The aim of the study is to investigate the representational meaning presented by the text and image modes and the relationship between them in Chinese textbooks used in an institution in Manila that offers Chinese course, in order to provide suggestions for the development and improvement of Chinese textbooks for ESL learners. This study adopted Kress & van Leeuwen’s visual grammar (1996) and Martinec & Salway’s image-text relation (2005) as the theoretical frameworks to analyze the multimodal resources in the Chinese textbooks New Concept Chinese Series Book 1 and Book 2. The multimodal modes in the selected Chinese textbooks were identified and categorized, then analyzed based on the given frameworks. The results showed that the target textbooks contain two main types of multimodal resources- the text mode and the image mode. In terms of the representational meaning, it was found out that most images in the selected materials belonged to the action process of the representational meaning, and more often presented students with scenes containing physical actions to help them understand the text content. Meanwhile, in terms of status relation, the images and texts in the selected textbooks convey more of an unequal position, with the images playing a more supportive role. Besides the results also revealed that the images in the textbooks appear first than the texts. This is in contrast to the textbooks for native speakers where texts are positioned first before the supporting images. In essence, the study is insightful as it recommends how teaching must pay close attention to the representational meaning of the multimodal modes and the status relation between the multimodal modes especially when teaching ESL learners. Keywords: Representational meaning in the Multimodal Discourse Analysis, New Concept Chinese Series, Visual Grammar, Status Relation of the Image-Text Relation