Exploring dialogic engagement with readers in multimodal EFL textbooks in China

Abstract

This article examines, from a social semiotic perspective, how multimodal resources in EFL textbooks are deployed to enable dialogic engagement with readers. A range of multimodal features in the textbooks, including illustrations and the labelling on illustrations, dialogue balloons, incomplete jointly-constructed texts, and highlighting, are identified as enabling editor voice to negotiate meanings with character and reader voice. Drawing upon and interrogating the appraisal systems of engagement and graduation, it shows how these semiotic resources function to realize various kinds and degrees of heteroglossia. It is also found that the way in which a certain engagement value can be scaled is strongly associated with the intrinsic property of a given multimodal resource, such as the projective structure of dialogue balloons, the co-constructedness of jointly-constructed texts, and the supporting role of illustrations. The findings are hoped to shed light on the understanding of dialogic process in a pedagogic context.