An Ideational Intersemiotic Analysis of Ecological Discourses in China’s English Textbooks

Abstract

Textbooks not only present knowledge but also pass on positive values. In the series of junior high school English textbooks published by Shanghai Education Press (SEP), there are quite a few multimodal discourses that convey positive ecological values. Based on the intersemiotic complementarity, this study made a multimodal discourse analysis of the ecological discourses in those junior high school English textbooks, aiming to explore how images and texts were combined to construct ecological ideational meanings and convey positive ecological values. The results showed that there existed three types of ecological values, which were living with animals and plants in harmony, saving resources and stopping pollution. Images and texts interacted and formed five types of relations, which were repetition, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy and collocation. Through these relations between the images and the texts, the ecological ideational meanings were constructed and the positive ecological values were well conveyed.