Multimodal Construction of Ideational Meaning on Opening Pages of English Textbooks in China

This study aims to examine how ideational meaning is multimodally constructed on 31 opening pages through the interaction of theme images and Look and Share questions in four newly published junior high school English textbooks by People’s Education Press. Adopting the multimodal discourse analytic approach, the study analyzed representational processes in 32 images using Visual Grammar and ideational processes in 97 verbal interrogatives through transitivity patterns. The findings show that opening page images are predominantly narrative, frequently foregrounding action and reactional processes. The verbal questions, in contrast, show a strong tendency toward mental processes, while material and relational processes also appear. Analysis of the interaction between visual and verbal modes reveals recurrent yet flexible patterns of alignment: reactional images often correspond with mental prompts, whereas conceptual representations tend to align with relational orientations. Overall, the study highlights opening pages as multimodal entry points where visual and verbal resources jointly shape experiential meaning at the beginning of textbook units. These findings offer insights into how multimodal resources in language textbooks support pedagogical meaning-making and provide implications for future textbook design and instructional practices.