A systemic functional analysis of multisemiotic biology texts 6

CHAPTER SIX IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING AND RESEARCH In light of the analyses presented in the preceding two chapters, this chapter discusses the implications of an SFL-informed multimodal approach to science textbooks for teaching English to tertiary students of science and engineering in the People’s Republic of China. To contextualize the discussion, I offer a brief overview and critique of the tertiary English language teaching (Section 6.1), which are followed by recommendations as to how to improve ESP (English for Specific Purposes) teaching and learning (Section 6.2). Section 6.3 outlines the limitations of the study and some future research areas and concludes the dissertation. 6.1 English Language Teaching to Science and Engineering Students The English language is a foreign language in China in the sense that the daily life of a typical citizen does not call for the use of the English language. In the education system from primary schools to the first two years of college, all subjects except English are taught in the Chinese language. The nationwide interest in the foreign language, especially the English language in the past two decades, has primarily resulted from the political, economic and social environment in the post-Mao China1. The late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s call for “a more open China” and the government’s efforts at attracting more foreign investments to help with its cause of modernisation and promoting international cultural exchange serve as the social context and social justification for the teaching and learning of the English language. 239 More importantly, on November 10, 2001, China gained entry to the World Trade Organization (WTO), making it essential for much of the economy to be more internationally oriented. At the turn of the millennium, the new international political and economic order, especially the rapid development of the information technology, has driven the Chinese authorities to push for a higher foreign language proficiency in the university graduates. The preliminary result of such a drive has been the promulgation of A Teaching Syllabus of College English (1999) (TSCE), the 5th of its kind since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The TSCE (applicable to non-English majors) in China is an official document stipulating guidelines to English language teachers on how the English language should be taught. It sets out the course requirements for the students after they have completed the course and gives suggestions on the teaching methodology. Its making followed a number of steps. First, needs analyses were carried out to determine what variety of English or what proficiency level is (or will be) required of the students by their future employers when they enter the workforce. This information feeds into the syllabus as the course requirement or specification. That is, which foreign language is chosen as the language to be taught to the majority of university students and what proficiency level the student should reach after the course are not justified internally but externally, that is, in relation to the political, social and economic environment of the nation. Second, language educators and specialists were consulted in setting out the curriculum, course content and course objectives. And thirdly, the current teaching and learning situation in Chinese universities was also taken into consideration (Shao 1999: 19). The course objectives for college English teaching set out by the TSCE (1999: 1; my translation) are as follows: 240 To develop in the students a high level of reading skills and a moderate level of listening, speaking, writing and translation skills, so that they can exchange information using English. College English teaching should help the students lay a good language foundation, acquire good language learning methods, and improve their cultural capacity, with a view to meeting the needs of the societal development and the economic construction of the nation. College English teaching is divided into two stages: the foundation stage (Year and Year 2, with the total contact hours of no less than 280) and the advanced stage consisting of Subject-Based English (SBE), with the total contact hours of no less than 100 (see Section 1.3.1 for the specific course objectives for SBE) and / or the Advanced English stage (Year and Year 4). The Foundation stage and SBE are compulsory and the Advanced English is optional. Thus, in terms of the nature of college English teaching, whether it is English for General Purposes or English for Academic Purposes, the TSCE adopts an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) approach, that is, its objective is to enable the students to eventually acquire and exchange information in their specialties through the medium of English. This EAP curriculum is structured into an English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) stage (in Year and Year 2) and an English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) stage (in Year and Year 4), where in the former stage “the skills and language that are common to all disciplines” (Dudley-Evans and St John 1998: 41) are taught and in the latter stage students are taught “the features that distinguish one discipline from others” (1998: 41). In practical, pedagogic terms, this means that all freshman and sophomore students, regardless of their specialties, study the common features or common core of academic English, and only in the junior year students from different disciplines start to study different English texts; for instance, biology majors read English used in biological sciences and law majors study legal English, and so forth. This approach to the teaching of EAP, that is, common core work followed by 241 specific work, has been adopted since 1980, as an alternative to the unsuccessful attempts in the 1960s and 1970s of teaching scientific English to students almost right after the English alphabet (Feng 1988: 543; Guo 1994: 3). This practice is roughly compatible with the tertiary ESP (English for Specific Purposes) projects in some Asian countries such as Malaysia (Tan and Celilia 1988: 99-100), the Philippines (Carreon 1988: 86) and the team-teaching in EAP at the University of Birmingham headed by Dudley-Evans (2001a: 226). Below I offer a short critique of the TSCE from the perspective of SFL, with special reference to the SBE stage. First, the TSCE would be strengthened if it provided an account of the meanings the students are required to make as well as the lexicogrammatical resources needed to make them. As is clear from the above, college English teaching is expected to meet the needs of societal and economic development of contemporary China. The English language is meant to be taught and learnt as an instrument to facilitate international cooperation between China and other parts of the world in trade, science and technology and so forth. A Chinese scientist may need to exchange information with his or her American, British or Japanese colleague either in the form of conversation or publication, or a Chinese tourist guide may need to entertain some Belgian travelers in China. On the surface, we can identify the proficiency in terms of reading, writing, listening, speaking and translation, as is done in the TSCE, as the number of words the students need to know and the number of words the students need to read or write per minute, for instance (TSCE: Table 2). However important that may be, such a description misses what the employers really expect of the graduates, that is, the ability to complete the task through the use of English, whether that involves acting as a tourist guide, or making a presentation in an international conference. What the students need, therefore, is a knowledge of or familiarity with the meanings that are at 242 stake for each different register. This should include the interpersonal relationships (the tenor), the content to be discussed (the field), and how the text is related to the situation (the mode). Thus what is actually needed in the syllabus is a description of what meanings are exchanged on such occasions, in terms of the clusters of ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings. This description should include not only language but also other semiotic resources, for instance, schematic drawings, tables and so on in the case of scientific publication and gesture, clothing, music and so on in the work of the tourist guide. Of course, how these meanings are lexicogrammatically realized in English is crucial, given the foreign context of EAP teaching. If the syllabus is to prepare the students for real-life international transactions, then a description of the meaning and the context, in addition to how these are realized in language and other semiotic resources, is essential (cf. Figure 2.9 above). A responsible syllabus should not be semantically empty and contextually void as is the current TSCE. It should, instead, see language as meaning potential and the development of a foreign language as the progressive mastery of more and more delicate and diversified meanings. To quote Hasan and Perrett (1994: 221), “[s]peaking meaningfully is not simply producing a structure or a set of words; it is using wording for meaning within a social context for the living of life”. In saying this, I assume that the Chinese students need to be taught what meanings are typically exchanged in a register when the English language is used in an international scientific and technological setting and this further assumes that the semantic styles in scientific texts in English and Chinese are not the same. It is obvious that Chinese and English differ greatly at the stratum of phonology and graphology. At the lexicogrammar stratum, Halliday (1993b: 124-132) compares the scientific Chinese texts and scientific English texts in terms of taxonomies, 243 objectification, and complex nominalization. Halliday and Matthiessen (1999: 297319) further compare the two languages in the construal of ideational meaning, which includes sequences, figures, elements and grammatical metaphor. The general conclusion from these studies is that the two languages are largely similar in their construal of experience, but there are also considerable differences. As far as the text structure, i.e. the macro-structure of a scientific paper, such as Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion, is concerned, Taylor and Chen (1991) compared the move structures (Swales 1984) in the introductions to papers written in a variety of related disciplines by three groups of physical scientists, Anglo-Americans writing in English, Chinese writing in English and Chinese writing in Chinese and claimed that “all the authors of the papers … are operating fundamentally within the same discourse schema, and that, … there is no ‘Chinese way’ of writing science that is attributable to features of the Chinese language system itself” (Taylor and Chen 1991: 330) and that “there is considerable difference between papers not on national lines but rather with respect to disciplinary differences” (1991: 332). To this, I would add that, while the moves may be identical between Chinese and English research papers, the lexicogrammatical resources through which the moves are realized are certainly not the same and that whether or not the Chinese scientists adopt the same stance towards their intended audience and the topics discussed as their Anglo-American counterparts and whether the two groups of scientists employ the same textual resources and strategies to organize the texts remain to be explored. A working assumption derivable from the above research may be that Chinese students need to study the text structure of scientific papers or textbook articles in English but that they need to study more intensely the lexicogrammar of the English language textbook or paper. A more complex reason for this can be found in Hasan’s (1996: 14) thesis that “a language is a 244 shaper of reality for those who use it”. The Chinese language shapes the Chinese science student’s perception of the world around him or her and forms his or her “primary socialization” (Hasan and Perrett 1994: 198), that is, “[h]er [a learner’s] conception of reality, her workaday knowledge of the world, her sense of the normal are all created in the learning of a first language” (1994: 197). Then the student has to learn the English language, a new language and a new way of construing the world (though not necessarily sharply different, but certainly not identical). The learning of English as a foreign language is the “secondary socialization” for the Chinese student, a REshaping, or at least an adjustment, where the Chinese student needs to adapt to the new language and the new world, both in general terms and in disciplinary knowledge, such as biology, physics and so on. Secondly, the TSCE provides no description of the linguistic features of the text types that it requires the students to learn. For instance, it lists English textbooks of the students’ specialization as one of the text types that students need to be exposed to in SBE (TSCE: Table 2), but, unfortunately, that is all that is said about this text type. Important questions such as “how are textbooks as a text type different from research papers?” and “what are the discoursal and linguistic features of textbooks?” are left unasked and unanswered. Several ESP authors have stressed the need for discourse analysis of the text types that the student will need to handle. Strevens (1988: 1-2), for example, believes that the teaching of “the language appropriate to those activities, in syntax, lexis, discourse, semantics, etc” is central for an ESP program. Dudley-Evans (2001b: 133-134) further notes: However much priority is given to needs analysis and the various approaches to it…, I believe that the key stage in ESP course design and materials development is the action needed following this needs analysis stage. This next stage is when the ESP teacher considers the 245 (written or spoken) texts that the learner has to produce and / or understand, tries to identify the texts’ key features and devises teaching material that will enable learners to use the texts effectively. Thirdly, the TSCE assumes that language is the only means of making meaning. My analyses in Chapter above, along with other studies (e.g. Lemke 1998a, 2000; O’Halloran 1996), clearly show that this is not the case. In a public lecture series given by four leading biochemical researchers2 held at the National University of Singapore in May, 2001, the speakers showed full-colour slides at an interval of several minutes depicting the three-dimensional structures of the protein and DNA and so on. Lemke (1998a; 2000) has shown that, in both scientific print genres in leading journals and in the post-compulsory science classrooms, a multiplicity of semiotic resources are deployed to make meaning. Since multimodality is the way science textbooks and other texts construct meaning, students (native speaker and non-native speaker alike) should be taught what each semiotic resource contributes to the meaning making and how the various semiotic resources work together and interact in a text type. This does not mean that the non-native students have to be taught explicitly all aspects of multimodal meaning making in the English texts. Rather, it points to the necessity that we sensitize students to the English way of drawing diagrams, designing page layout and so forth. As with the linguistic similarities and differences between the English language and the Chinese language, the non-linguistic resources in the English science textbooks may not work exactly the same as the Chinese ones. Thus in general, the non-native students need to be aware of the multimodal construction of meaning in scientific texts. As Lemke (2000: 269) explains, Multi-literacies and hybrid genres should be taught. What I mean by this is that both teachers and students should be made consciously 246 aware of their existence: what they are, what they are used for, what resources they deploy, how they can be integrated with one another, how they are typically formed, what their values and limitations are. It can be seen from the above analysis that SFL has not yet found its way to the teaching of English as a foreign language in China. As Huang (2002: 287) notes, “there are more papers [in the Chinese systemic-functional research community] on the description of English and Chinese than those on the teaching of English and / or Chinese”. This contrasts sharply with the application of SFL in some parts of Australia to the teaching of English as a second language to adult migrants and foreign students who seek employment and higher education respectively in Australia and whose mother tongues are other than English3. In Section 6.2 below I discuss the problems in SBE teaching and propose some remedies. 6.2 Problems and How to Solve them 6.2.1 Results of Recent Surveys on SBE Teaching Realizing the importance of SBE stage to college English education in China, a number of Chinese researchers have attempted to survey the current teaching of SBE in selected universities. Below I discuss the results of Liao and Qin (2000) and Luo et al (2001) in particular. Liao and Qin (2000: 27-29) report that 57% of the students surveyed and 51% of the administrative staff surveyed are not satisfied with the current teaching of SBE in their universities and Luo et al (2001: 36; my translation) observe that “[despite rapid progress in the past decade or so], overall, college English teaching is weak and 247 cannot meet the societal and economic demands of the nation” and that SBE is “particularly weak”. “As a result”, Luo et al (2001: 36; my translation) continue to write, “[in terms of English proficiency of the students], Year is worse than Year 3, which is in turn worse than Year 2”. This is an unacceptable situation and demands the immediate action from all parties concerned (cf. Zhang 2002; 2003). The reasons for such a low profile for the SBE are varied and include at least the following. First, there is a lack of proper textbooks. In Liao and Qin’s (2000: 27; 29) survey, 65% of the students say that the materials they use in class are in-house texts, selected by the teacher from technical literature. The quality of these texts is very much in doubt. Similarly, 49% of the instructors surveyed by Liao and Qin (2000) report that the biggest problem in SBE teaching is the lack of proper textbooks. Luo et al (2001: 38) note a big mismatch between textbook types in current use and those students would like to use. Whereas 55.9% of the students wish to use textbooks that are oriented towards a combination of language, culture and specialist knowledge, only 19.8% of the texts are of this type. Second, there is a lack of good teachers. In many Chinese universities SBE teaching is offered by subject specialists who are interested in teaching the course. For example, Yang (1994: 63) reports that 90% of the SBE reading courses in one college are offered by subject specialists. Many of these subject specialists not speak acceptable English and according to Liao and Qin (2000: 29) 51% of them speak mostly Chinese in SBE class. According to the students, the “ideal” SBE teachers are people who know the subject knowledge in the student’s specialization, speak good English, are well-grounded in English and Chinese, know how to teach and have a pleasant personality (Luo et al 2001: 40). Such teachers are in short supply in China (perhaps also elsewhere). The key problem is that liberal arts trained teachers of 248 English know little about the students’ specialization and subject specialists are normally poor in oral English and not receive training in English teaching methodology. Thirdly, there is a lack of good teaching methodology. Luo et al’s (2001: 40) survey shows that 51.0% of the students report that their SBE classes are conducted through language analysis plus translation while what they (51.5% of the students surveyed) really like is reading plus discussion. Given the scope of this study, it is not possible to identify and solve all the problems in the SBE teaching and learning. However, I will put forward some suggestions based on the analyses in Chapters and above. 6.2.2 Towards a Multimodal Social Semiotic Approach to SBE In this sub-section I synthesize the various analyses presented in Chapters and and discuss their implications for teaching SBE to Chinese university students majoring in life sciences and related fields. This discussion is geared towards the development of reading ability in the students rather than other skills such as listening, writing and speaking, sharing Dong’s (2003) conviction that reading and writing should remain top priority in China’s college English education. An assumption behind this attempt is that an explicit instruction about the multimodal features of the textbooks will empower the students embarking upon the task of reading textbooks in their specialization by helping them develop “a form of cultural capital” (Feez 2002: 55) possessed by initiated members of the scientific community. 249 Beginning with Meaning In the critique of the TSCE in Section 6.1, I pointed to the lack of concern with semantics in the nationwide syllabus. While an individual teacher of SBE is normally not in a position to change this, he or she is able to organize his or her teaching along a meaning-based pedagogy. Unsworth’s (2000: 249-251; 2001: 125) work4 on the genres of school science provides a useful starting point for analyzing and teaching the various text types in tertiary textbooks. According to Unsworth (2001: 125), the genres for Doing science include Procedure and Procedural Recount, those for Explaining events scientifically include Sequential Explanation, Theoretical Explanation, Factorial Explanation and so forth, those for Organizing scientific information include Descriptive Report and Taxonomic Report, and those for Challenging science include Exposition and Discussion. In the biology texts analyzed above, all the activities are present except Challenging science. For instance, Cl.s 148204 of Text construct a Procedure for carrying out an experiment. Most clauses in the texts, however, are concerned with Organizing scientific information and Explaining events scientifically. By teaching the students about the social activity a group of clauses perform, the SBE lecturer can help the students relate the text to what it does in the subjects of their specialization (cf. Section 4.1.2) and familiarize them with how the English language and other semiotic resources are used to construct such meanings. In what follows I describe some of the multimodal literacies that a teacher may find it necessary to teach his or her students, drawing upon the analyses presented in Chapters and 5. In order to conduct fruitful and effective discussions about the semiotic resources deployed in the textbooks, the teacher and his or her students need a 250 shared vocabulary, or “a metalanguage – a language for talking about language, images, texts and meaning-making interactions” (New London Group 2000: 24). For many teaching purposes, a simplified version of Halliday (1994) would suffice for a grammar to talk about linguistic resources and the key concepts of O’Toole (1994) or Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) would provide a language for the visual images. Teaching the Construction of Ideational Meaning In terms of process types, the analyses in Section 4.2.1.1 show that the selection of process types is sensitive to and constructive of the field of discourse. In order to get a general view of the experiential meaning of a text, a student should be encouraged to look for the dominating process types in a particular text. For example, when reading Text 2, a student may need to note the high frequency of relational processes (48.0%) and deduce that relations between entities or events rather than the events themselves are the focus in Text 2. I not mean by this that the science student conducts detailed analysis of the text. Rather, a basic distinction between the processes of doing, being and thinking / saying would be adequate for him or her to catch the gist of the text. In addition to the general frequencies of process types in the text, a student may need to distinguish between subcategories of a particular process type. In discussing the material process (Section 4.2.1.1), I make a distinction between simple happening, metaphorical happening and doing. A clause as a happening in the biology texts is constructed from the point of view of the researcher as the observer, while a clause as doing is constructed from the point of view of the participant. It is important for the student to tell these two apart. As well, although the metaphorical happening is not a frequent sub-type of material process (Table 4.3), it is undoubtedly more complex than 251 the other two sub-types because it involves grammatical metaphor. To understand such metaphorical happenings the student needs to stand back, as it were, to see not only the “gene”, but also the “gene transcription”, as in Cl. 277 of Text (“gene transcription is able to resume”). Following Schleppegrell (2001: 455), such academic semantic style as nominalization should be explained to the students. In particular, the student’s attention should be drawn to circumstantial identifying relational process because this clause type most often constructs [cause: reason] relation metaphorically, in the “favourite clause type” of scientific English (Halliday 1998: 206-207). As discussed in Section 4.2.2, the selections of logical resources across the three texts analyzed above exhibit similarities. For example, in all three texts parataxis occurs less frequently than hypotaxis and expansion overwhelmingly outnumbers projection. Such a knowledge about the general patterns in how one clause relates to another can be helpful for the reading. The teacher should pay special attention to the implicit realization of logical relations and offer some guidance for the students to arrive at the right interpretation of, say, the semantic-logico relation between a primary clause and a non-finite secondary clause, where no clue is available from the text itself. Thematic pattern analysis (Lemke 1990) is a valuable tool for the teacher and the student who wish to grasp what a whole text means ideationally. After the students finish reading a scientific text, they may be asked to draw a thematic diagram, showing how the various items relate to each other. This is a particularly useful exercise for those students who understand every single clause but tend to have difficulty in grasping the point of the whole text. For very often a thematic pattern can be realized in a variety of lexicogrammatical structures; the student may need to thoroughly 252 understand these structures in order to construct the correct thematic pattern. And as a result, he or she improves his or her reading comprehension. Teaching the Construction of Interpersonal Meaning A dominant pattern for interpersonal meaning in terms of SPEECH FUNCTION and MOOD across the three texts analyzed is that the biology textbook predominantly gives information; only occasionally is the reader asked questions or instructed to carry out actions. In order to learn creatively, however, the student needs to be critical of the texts and develop disciplinary argumentative styles. The teacher may thus need to remind the students of the potential bias of the texts and encourage them to question the texts, work “against” the texts, when appropriate. For a Chinese student of science and engineering, English MODALITY is problematic, partly because the system of options in MODALITY is complex (Halliday 1994: 360) and partly because the finite modal operators such as “can” each have a number of meanings. The two factors combined often make the student unable to decide what “can” means: probability, obligation, or ability. In addition to the usage of “can”, the teacher needs also to draw the student’s attention to “will” for usuality. Students should also know that when probability is an issue, they are introduced to the frontiers of the current science – things the scientific community has not found adequate consensus about. Finally, the student needs to pay special attention to the role of the co-text in the values of some semantic categories, as discussed in Section 4.3.2. 253 Teaching Textual Meaning Since the Chinese student needs to read long stretches of texts such as textbooks in their areas of specialization, it is essential that he or she develop some skills in handling the general Thematic patterns in the text. These include the grammatical properties of the selected Themes and the clause-by-clause development of the Theme. For instance, students should be aware that unmarked Themes greatly outnumber the marked Themes in the texts. At the same time he or she also needs to be particularly sensitive to the occurrence of a marked Theme. In such an event, the student should try to find out, by looking at the preceding and following clauses, why the author selects a marked Theme rather than an unmarked one. For a long stretch of text, another aspect of its textual structure is the clause-byclause development of the Themes. As remarked by Halliday (1994: 67), “[t]he thematic organization of the clauses (and clause complexes, where relevant) is the most significant factor in the development of the text”. Without an explicit knowledge of the contribution of the Themes of the clauses to the “method of development” (1994: 61) of a text and some amount of practice, the non-native student may find it difficult to follow the text. In Section 4.4.2 I analyzed the experiential content of the selected Themes in terms of both the transitivity roles and the subject-specific nature. Such a description may have immediate relevance for students reading a similar textbook to those analyzed here because from this analysis he or she knows what subject-specific categories constitute the major concern of the text and hence require his or her particular attention. Students of other disciplines may be encouraged to examine the development of Themes in texts of their own choice. 254 In addition, Martin’s (1992: 437) notions of “hyper-Theme”, “macro-Theme”, “hyper-New” and “macro-New” (Section 2.2.3 above) and Martin and Rose’s (2003) notion of a succession of “little waves”, “bigger waves” and “tidal waves” in long stretches of texts can be used to teach the students about the macro-structure of the textbook. In this connection, the three texts analyzed display a similar chapter structure: an Introduction to the chapter, and / or Objectives of the chapter (Text 2), followed by the Body consisting of a number of Sections, which is followed by a Summary and Exercises (in Texts and 2). Such a knowledge about the Theme beyond the clause would help the non-native student make sense of the method of development of the text. Teaching Multimodal Construction of Science Research in ESP / EAP, both for native speakers of English and non-native speakers, has almost exclusively concentrated on language issues (see, for example, Swales’s (2001) review of the developments of ESP / EAP in the past forty years), assuming that once the learner crosses the language barrier, he or she will achieve academic success. Language, of course, constitutes our major means of meaning-making and may continue to be one of the problems that hinder one’s progress through his or her career. But as I have shown in Chapter 5, following Myers (1990; 1995) and Thibault (2001), in biology textbook genres language is only one resource for making certain kinds of meaning. It is simply not able to make certain topological meanings required in certain contexts and it means what it does mean in the first place only in codeployment and co-contextualizations with other resources (Thibault 2000: 312, 362). In professional scientific practice, as attested by Lynch and Woolgar (1990) and 255 Lemke (1998a), “as the fine edge and the final stage” of some laboratory research, the “tiny set of figures” drawn on the paper rather than the “[b]leeding and screaming rats” in the lab “is all that counts” (Latour 1990: 39-40; original emphasis). And the grantproposals in engineering must be written and designed in a way that enables the peer reviewers “to find the abstract, [mathematical] formulas, tables, illustrations, and references with ease” (Johns 1993: 82). Thanks to the pioneering work of Kress et al (2001), Lemke (2000), O’Halloran (1996; 2000), Scott and Jewitt (2003) and Johns (1998) we have been able to see that in science classrooms “learning can no longer be treated as a process which depends on language centrally, or even dominantly. … Learning happens through (or … learners actively engage with) all modes as a complex activity in which speech or writing are involved among a number of modes” (Kress et al 2001: 1). Therefore, teachers of ESP classes need to take seriously the multimodal nature of meaning-making in academic apprenticeship and professional life so as to better prepare the students for their current and future academic and professional life. The analyses of the texts in Chapter show that there are different types of page layout and colour schemes and different types of visual displays in the biology texts. Each of these types is functional and requires a specific set of interpretative skills on the part of the reader. It follows that these visual literacies should become part of the ESP classroom. For instance, the ESP teacher may need to explain to the students about the conventions needed for the interpretation of the visual images of various types and how the visual images relate to the linguistic text. He or she may also find it necessary to design some multimodal-oriented exercises so that the students can practise what has been explained to them. Only then can the students understand the multimodal composite, that is, the images and the linguistic text that accompanies 256 them. Royce (2002: 192; original emphasis) notes that in teaching English to speakers of other languages, teachers “need to help learners develop multimodal communicative competence” (see also Kress 2000b). If this argument holds for the teaching of English in general, I believe that it also applies to the teaching of ESP. 6.3 Limitations of the Study and Outline of Future Research: Concluding Remarks In this study, I have developed a set of systemic-functional (SF) theoretical frameworks for the analysis of multimodal biology texts (Chapter 3, in particular), selected and analysed three biology texts in terms of multimodal meaning-making (Chapters and 5), and explored the implications for pedagogy in the area of teaching ESP to Chinese college students of science and engineering (Chapter 6). The significance of this work is that it enables language educators to appreciate that meaning in specialist and general domains does not reside only in the linguistic mode. Rather, other semiotic resources also contribute to meaning making in contemporary communication, both in their own specific ways and in conjunction with language. Only by taking these other resources into account can learners really succeed in their learning and function adequately in their future work. In what follows, I discuss the limitations of the present study and outline some future research areas. The first thing that should be noted is the small size of the corpus on which the analyses are based. This may affect the extent to which the findings can be generalized and hence the utility of the work. The small sample of texts analysed has also made it difficult to make useful comparisons between texts in terms of a number 257 of parameters, say topics; there are simply too few texts selected for each of the topics, for instance the topic of mitosis in biology. Thus this study has proposed a set of analytic frameworks but explored their potentialities only in a limited number of texts. Given more time and resources, a much larger corpus of biology or biochemistry texts can be established and analysed within the same or similar framework and using software programmes such as Systemics 1.0 (Judd and O’Halloran 2002). Another issue that this study has not attended to adequately is the classroom talk and writing and drawing that these selected textbooks are supposed to generate. As noted in Section 4.1 above, in the classroom lecturers recreate the textbooks that they recommend, by reference to a range of other sources and by catering to the students’ levels and interests, and the actual delivery of the lesson will consequently differ from what is in the textbooks. The contribution of the students to the classroom discourse cannot be ignored either, as they ask questions in and outside of the classroom, make mistakes in the assignments and become bored, all of which influence the “what” and “how” the lecturer performs. Further work can be directed to the talk, writing and drawing that centre around the textbooks and to how scientific knowledge and social identity are co-constructed in the classroom by the lecturers and students. A third issue that should be clarified here is the reading / viewing position that the author has taken in the analyses. Relevant to the aims of the study is the choice between the reading / viewing position of a teacher / expert and that of a student. In this study I have assumed the position of a teacher / expert and tried to interpret the texts the way a subject specialist of biology would if he or she also had a good grasp of SFL. This reading position has obvious advantages, for example, it ensures that the interpretations are academically sound. The downside to this position is that it does not take the learner or the novice into consideration. The pupil may interpret the texts 258 or images differently from a teacher or expert, which is the major reason why he or she is called “a learner or novice”. Pintó (2002) for example has reported that students of various nationalities encounter difficulties in interpreting visual images in secondary school physics and, more worryingly, that the teachers tend to “have a low degree of awareness of students’ difficulties reading images” (Pintó 2002: 340). Separate studies can reveal the developmental pathways a learner undergoes before he or she becomes an expert reader / viewer. Fourthly, the discussion about how a multimodal approach might contribute to teaching ESP to Chinese students of science and engineering has largely been conducted from a theoretical rather than empirical point of view. Putting these proposals into practice will raise new issues and present new challenges but will eventually enrich the theory. It is encouraging to note that since the mid-1990s Baldry (2000b) and Pavesi and Baldry (2000) have taken significant steps to design and offer multimodal ESP / EAP courses to both complete beginners and more advanced students. This includes the development of multimedia environment self-access courseware and corpora. And both Unsworth (2001) and Royce (2002) have attempted to explore the classroom practicalities of teaching multiliteracies. It will be interesting to find out how an SFL-informed multimodal approach to teaching ESP might work in a Chinese context, for example, not only in relation to the teaching and learning of reading comprehension of the specialist texts but also in relation to the development of writing, listening and speaking skills in ESP. One set of research questions that is particularly relevant to the discussion here is: “How student attempts to discuss visuals differ from those of the experts? In what ways? Why?” (Johns 1998: 192). Another area that is worth exploring is the historical evolution of the visual images in specialist texts, as advocated by Baldry (2000b) and O’Halloran (2003; 259 forthcoming). It is believed that such resources initially were evolved to perform certain functions and meet certain semiotic demand of some human activity, to make meaning which would otherwise not exist. But exactly how and why did they come into use and what stages of development have they undergone? Take the structural formula of molecule (Section 5.3.6 above) for instance. How and why has a certain line diagram (with certain parts labeled by symbols) come to be used to represent the structure of a molecule? And how and why has H2O come to stand for water and has a biochemical reaction been written in a certain manner, as the following? CH4 + 2O2 CO2 + 2H2O. Finally, I also suggest that the multimodal construction of meaning should be reflected in ESP / EAP assessment. With the new pair of spectacles called multimodal social semiotics, the nature and complexity of scientific discourse and how they might be more effectively taught to ESP / EAP students may be further explored. 260 [...]... Remarks In this study, I have developed a set of systemic- functional (SF) theoretical frameworks for the analysis of multimodal biology texts (Chapter 3, in particular), selected and analysed three biology texts in terms of multimodal meaning-making (Chapters 4 and 5), and explored the implications for pedagogy in the area of teaching ESP to Chinese college students of science and engineering (Chapter... of the potential bias of the texts and encourage them to question the texts, work “against” the texts, when appropriate For a Chinese student of science and engineering, English MODALITY is problematic, partly because the system of options in MODALITY is complex (Halliday 1994: 360 ) and partly because the finite modal operators such as “can” each have a number of meanings The two factors combined often... the teacher and his or her students need a 250 shared vocabulary, or a metalanguage – a language for talking about language, images, texts and meaning-making interactions” (New London Group 2000: 24) For many teaching purposes, a simplified version of Halliday (1994) would suffice for a grammar to talk about linguistic resources and the key concepts of O’Toole (1994) or Kress and van Leeuwen (19 96) would... that the author has taken in the analyses Relevant to the aims of the study is the choice between the reading / viewing position of a teacher / expert and that of a student In this study I have assumed the position of a teacher / expert and tried to interpret the texts the way a subject specialist of biology would if he or she also had a good grasp of SFL This reading position has obvious advantages,... resources, a much larger corpus of biology or biochemistry texts can be established and analysed within the same or similar framework and using software programmes such as Systemics 1.0 (Judd and O’Halloran 2002) Another issue that this study has not attended to adequately is the classroom talk and writing and drawing that these selected textbooks are supposed to generate As noted in Section 4.1 above,... Such a knowledge about the general patterns in how one clause relates to another can be helpful for the reading The teacher should pay special attention to the implicit realization of logical relations and offer some guidance for the students to arrive at the right interpretation of, say, the semantic-logico relation between a primary clause and a non-finite secondary clause, where no clue is available... learners actively engage with) all modes as a complex activity in which speech or writing are involved among a number of modes” (Kress et al 2001: 1) Therefore, teachers of ESP classes need to take seriously the multimodal nature of meaning-making in academic apprenticeship and professional life so as to better prepare the students for their current and future academic and professional life The analyses... analyses of the texts in Chapter 5 show that there are different types of page layout and colour schemes and different types of visual displays in the biology texts Each of these types is functional and requires a specific set of interpretative skills on the part of the reader It follows that these visual literacies should become part of the ESP classroom For instance, the ESP teacher may need to explain... Lynch and Woolgar (1990) and 255 Lemke (199 8a) , “as the fine edge and the final stage” of some laboratory research, the “tiny set of figures” drawn on the paper rather than the “[b]leeding and screaming rats” in the lab “is all that counts” (Latour 1990: 39-40; original emphasis) And the grantproposals in engineering must be written and designed in a way that enables the peer reviewers “to find the abstract,... Thematic pattern analysis (Lemke 1990) is a valuable tool for the teacher and the student who wish to grasp what a whole text means ideationally After the students finish reading a scientific text, they may be asked to draw a thematic diagram, showing how the various items relate to each other This is a particularly useful exercise for those students who understand every single clause but tend to have . theoretical frameworks for the analysis of multimodal biology texts (Chapter 3, in particular), selected and analysed three biology texts in terms of multimodal meaning-making (Chapters 4 and 5), and. 250 shared vocabulary, or a metalanguage – a language for talking about language, images, texts and meaning-making interactions” (New London Group 2000: 24). For many teaching purposes, a simplified. and future academic and professional life. The analyses of the texts in Chapter 5 show that there are different types of page layout and colour schemes and different types of visual displays