More than Meets the Eye: An Image-Text Meaning Construction of Contemporary Senior High School English Textbooks in China

In a globalized era of information technology and multimedia, the content compila-tion of high school English textbooks has transformed from a single textual modality into a multimodal one. This study aims to conduct a systematic visual grammar anal-ysis of the current People’s Education Press (2024) of senior high school English textbooks in China and explore how multimodal resources, such as images and texts, integrate and present knowledge in language textbooks. The study analyzed three compulsory English textbooks, employing Visual Grammar as its analytical frame-work. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are used to examine images in the reading sections of senior high school English textbooks. The findings of this study are: (1) the visual design in these textbooks not only effectively complement the language content of reading section through the representative meanings of images but also strengthen the coherence of the readings’ plots through narrative structures of the images; (2) the reading section’s images mainly aims at enhancing the viewers’ sense of participation; (3) a text-centered layout with images playing an assisted role. This study seeks to offer a detailed analysis and reference for enhancing the visual design and multimodal integration of senior high school English textbooks, and to further contribute to the application of visual grammar theory in research on the re-lated field.