Image-text Relations in Junior High School EFL Textbooks in China: A Mixed-methods Study

Abstract

This study seeks to test the applicability of Martinec and Salway’s (2005) framework of image-text relations in school textbook discourse, and adopts mixed methods by combining quantification of thirteen categories in Martinec and Salway’s analytical framework with interpretations of the relations between visual images and verbal language in the six junior high school EFL textbooks to generalize multimodal trends in pedagogical discourse. The findings shed some light on cultivating students’ multimodal literacy in the pedagogical context of Mainland China.