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

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.54855/ijte.23322

Keywords:

Appraisal; Visual Appraisal, attitudinal expressions, multimodal texts, textbooks

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.

Author Biography

  • Nguyen Tien Phung, Quy Nhon University, Quy Nhon, Vietnam

    Dr. Nguyen Tien Phung is a senior lecturer at Quy Nhon University, Vietnam. He has been teaching English at the Department of Foreign Languages for over twenty-four years. He received a Master degree in English Linguistics from College of Foreign Languages, VNU, Hanoi in 2003 and a PhD degree in Educational Linguistics from Australian Catholic University in 2020. His research interest is Multimodality, Appraisal and application of Systemic Functional Linguistics in the context of teaching English in Vietnam.

     

     

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Published

11-04-2023

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Section

Research Article

How to Cite

Nguyen, T. P. (2023). Preliminary Investigation into the Affordances of Evaluative Resources in Multimodal Texts of an Established Textbook Series in Vietnam. International Journal of TESOL & Education, 3(2), 14-31. https://doi.org/10.54855/ijte.23322

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