Visual Grammar

Despite being an important category of multimodal tourism discourse, Inflight magazines and their roles in promoting international airlines’ profile and their host country, are mostly under-researched. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine the application of different visual and semiotic strategies regarding social actors' race, age and social class and how people are represented in different international airlines’ inflight magazines. For this purpose, 16 international airlines’ inflight magazine issues were selected depending on the host country's geographical location and availability. Using Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006 [1996]) and van Leeuwen’s (2008) visual grammar, the data were analyzed based on ideational, interpersonal and compositional levels. The results revealed that inflight magazine designers, content developers and advertisement agencies tend to apply certain visual and semiotic resources. They reinforce bias and false stereotypes towards certain groups of people in terms of their age, race and social class originating in political, historical and ideological perceptions and standpoints of higher institutions across the world. The findings also highlight the importance of visual literacy being promoted to the target audience, including air travelers and EFL learners.

The Analects of Confucius is one of the representative works of traditional Chinese culture and has been translated into different versions. Tsai Chih-Chung's English comic version is one of the most popular among the different translated versions. It has a considerable potential to spread Chinese culture by multimodal means. A brief review shows that so far, there have been few studies on Tsai Chih-Chung's Chinese classic comics from the perspective of multimodality. This study applies the analytical framework based on Kress and van Leeuwen’s “Visual Grammar” to Tsai Chih-Chung's English comic version of The Analects of Confucius, attempting to explore how the visual modes realize three meta-meanings in the English comic version. Through the analysis, it is found that the images in Tsai Chih-Chung's English comic version fully realize the representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning. Furthermore, most of the images in Tsai Chih-Chung's English comic version realize more than just one meta-meaning, and more frequently include all three meta-meanings. By combining the texts and images organically, Tsai Chih-Chung's English comic version has been successful in attracting readers to read the classic, deepening the readers’ understanding of the classic and finally making them accept the cultural essence embedded in it. This study provides a case reference for the analysis of multimodal discourse in Chinese classic comics, and also contributes to optimizing Chinese classic comics’ design and innovation.

As environmental issues become more prevalent, it is vital to incorporate ecological components into the curriculum to equip future generations with the necessary foundations to preserve and improve ecology. In light of this circumstance, many countries are compelled to include instructional approaches representing environmentally-based topics in textbooks. Nevertheless, whether the textbooks facilitate environmental education (EE) to promote ecological principles or foster students' competence in recurrent environmental concerns is ambivalent, particularly in the Indonesian context. The current study attempts to analyze the ecological verbal and visual contents engaged in Indonesian EFL textbooks. This study also unpacks the extent to which EFL textbooks in Indonesia accurately reflected the ecolinguistics perspective. Content analysis was employed in this study, adapting Stibbe’s (2015) ecolinguistics framework and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2016) visual grammar theory. The findings revealed that EE in Indonesian EFL textbooks highlights the natural beauty and ecotourism locations while mainly disregarding ecological degradation. In contrast, EFL textbooks must emphasize contemporary world issues to cultivate positive attitudes and ecological consciousness among learners. Subsequently, these findings have significant consequences for the development of environment modules in Indonesian EFL textbooks.