A MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF A MEDICAL TEXTBOOK IN VIETNAM - PRELIMINARY FINDINGS

Abstract

Visual images in textbooks can stimulate students’ interest and encourage them to learn language in more critical and creative ways (Canning-Wilson, 1999). As a natural requirement of the field, medical textbooks contain a variety of visual images, but they seem to have received little attention from textbook developers in Vietnam possibly due to both a lack of awareness and research. Therefore, the study attempts to explore the visual elements in a medical textbook in use in the country, analyze their functions as well as their appropriateness for pedagogical purposes. This paper presents preliminary findings from the qualitative analysis of the yielded results couched with Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) Visual Grammar framework to primarily identify three metafunctions of visual elements in the medical textbook. The study is believed to give pedagogical benefits to both teachers and students, and suggest practical improvement to critical aspects of the visual images, which is ultimately useful to developers of medical textbooks in particular, and other textbooks in general.