Preliminary Investigation into the Affordances of Evaluative Resources in Multimodal Texts of an Established Textbook Series in Vietnam

Abstract

The paper aims to initially examine the deployment of Attitude in multimodal reading texts in Solutions (Falla & Davies, 2013), an English textbook series being used as textbooks in most universities in Vietnam. To reach its aim, it first deployed the Appraisal framework proposed by Martin and White (2005) to examine evaluative resources in the fifteen verbal texts of the five genres of Anecdote, Biographical recount, Exposition, Narrative, and Review (Rose & Martin, 2012). A closer examination of how images contribute to articulating evaluation is then conducted on five of these multimodal reading texts in light of the Visual Appraisal frameworks suggested by Economou (2009) and White (2014) and the terms Convergence and Divergence proposed by Painter, Martin and Unsworth (2013). It was found that various aspects of Attitude are exploited with a range of frequency in different genres. It was also indicated that Convergence tends to be more frequently deployed than Divergence. In the same multimodal text, both cases of Convergence and Divergence may occur or only one of the two types. In any way, they all have the function of co-articulating attitude. The paper concludes by highlighting the necessity of selecting appropriate images in textbooks among editors and deploying images in effectively teaching multimodal texts among lecturers and teachers.