Towards a Multimodal Analysis of Images in a Medical Textbook

Abstract

In the teaching and learning process, images play a vital role in supporting the effectiveness of teaching materials. They can act as communication tools and powerful elements in constructing learners’ knowledge relating to the real world that cannot be formed in classroom activities (Canning- Wilson, 1999). A descriptive qualitative research design was conducted for identifying the interactive metafunction used in the images basing on the theory of reading images (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006) and Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday, 1994). The data for this multimodal analysis were taken from five visual images of an English medical textbook. The findings show that the textbook dominantly used realistic images. The visual modes in the textbook complemented each other to strengthen the meaning of the scientific concept delivered to the learners. The above results have implications for conditions for the effective exploitation and incorporation of visual images from medical science into classes.