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 China
1
.
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.

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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 5
th
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:

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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
1 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 3 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 1 and Year 2) and an English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) stage
(in Year 3 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 do 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,

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objectification, and complex nominalization. Halliday and Matthiessen (1999: 297-
319) 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 5 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 researchers
2
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 English
3
. 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 4 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 do 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 do 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 4 and 5 above.

6.2.2 Towards a Multimodal Social Semiotic Approach to SBE

In this sub-section I synthesize the various analyses presented in Chapters 4 and 5 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.



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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) work
4
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 148-
204 of Text 3 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 4 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 do 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 1 (“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.

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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-by-
clause 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.

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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 1 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 co-
deployment 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 grant-
proposals 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 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 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 4 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

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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

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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 do 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;

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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 H
2
O come to stand for water and has a
biochemical reaction been written in a certain manner, as the following?

CH
4
+ 2O

2
CO
2
+ 2H
2
O.

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.


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