TITLE:
The Interpersonal Meaning Analysis of Children’s Language-Learning-Focused Picture Books: From a Multimodal Discourse Analysis Perspective
AUTHORS:
Jiaqi Wang, Jing Yin
KEYWORDS:
Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Interpersonal Meaning, Picture Books, Oxford Reading Tree
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Access Library Journal,
Vol.11 No.6,
June
12,
2024
ABSTRACT: Children’s picture books are typical combinations of image modality and text modality. Reading well-illustrated picture books will help to develop children’s early literacy skills, which will in turn impact their subsequent academic development and socialization. From the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis and based on the Systemic Functional Grammar and Visual Narrative Theory, the study took the language-learning-focused picture book set level 4 of Oxford Reading Tree as an example and analyzed how interpersonal meanings are constructed in it. Through the analysis of mood, modality, and person systems in the verbal mode, focalization, pathos, and ambience in the visual mode, and the two relations of elaboration and extension between pictures and words, the study deciphers the ways of constructing pictorial-text relations in picture books and provides insightful implications for parents and teachers to do picture book reading with children effectively while improving their language skills and especially the narrative macrostructure.