Modern Social Science Research

With the new curriculum standards emphasizing the cultivation of core competencies and multimodal teaching, as the core carrier for language instruction, the design and utilization of multimodal resources in junior high school English textbooks have increasingly become a focus of pedagogical research. This paper examines the 2024 Edition of the FLTRP’s Grade 8 English textbook, Volume 1. Drawing upon Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar and Kress and Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar, it focuses on three core modalities including text, images, and symbols to explore the distributional features and functional mechanisms of multimodal discourses within the textbook. It is found that the textbook delivers knowledge through the coordinated use of diverse modal resources, aligning with the new curriculum standards to achieve its educational value. The findings provide practical insights for multimodal design and analysis of junior high English textbooks and offer strategies and guidance for teachers to effectively utilize multimodal resources within textbooks.

Multimodal discourse analysis; Junior high English textbooks; Systemic functional grammar; Visual grammar