Ideational meanings of science and interpersonal position of readers in science textbooks for basic level in Indonesia

Abstract

This paper investigates the ideational meanings of science through the analyses of types and functions of the images used in science textbooks, the formality of the pictures, the genre of the texts used as the main passage, and the process types used. This paper also probes into the interpersonal meaning of science through the analysis of pronouns used to address the readers, the analysis of represented participants, including the existence or nonexistence of gaze, and the position of the images in relation to their interactive participants. The data for the study consisted of three randomly selected topics from science textbooks for grade 7,8 and 9 based on two different curricula used, namely KTSP 2006 and Kurikulum 2013. Reading images as proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996; was used to analyze the visual images along with systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as proposed by Halliday (1994); Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) to analyze the verbal texts. The findings show that ideationally, the most dominant type of pictures used in the topics investigated is realistic pictures, pictures which represent human optical perception. In terms of the function of the pictures, analytical pictures, pictures which show the part-whole relationship, are dominantly used in the topics. Ideationally, the topics in the textbooks maintain the sameness of forms and colors of the scientific objects students study at schools as their real objects. Interpersonally, readers are positioned as the receivers of the message from persons who are more knowledgable, hence, more powerful than they are but, at the same time, approachable by the readers.

Image-Text Relation Interpretation: Teachers’ Visual-Verbal Competence in Teaching Texts

“…Moreover, the teachers' preference to use pictures as provided in the textbook is also responded by researchers, proven by any studies in EFL teaching context focusing on analysing images in the textbook seen from any angle (da Costa & de Barros, 2012;Hermawan & Rahyono, 2019;Liu & Qu, 2014). Their studies implicitly show that teachers now days still gain the textbook as a good and practical alternative to use in the teaching texts.…”

“…It implies that many teachers are not aware of the importance of developing students' visual literacy in the classroom setting (Duchak, 2014) since the priority is delivering the content in the texts. Seeing this, a study has been conducted by (Hermawan & Rahyono, 2019) that transformation and transduction should be employed in teaching multimodal texts to students. This study discusses some opportunities of teachers in teaching students' multimodal literacy.…”

Experiential meaning as meaning making choice in article writing: A case study of female and male writers

“…There is an essential piece of information for creating a better understanding of how mental process usage influences teachers' points of views about their profession and deals with it. Another study is conducted by Hermawan and Rahyono (2019) in which they analyzed the experiential meaning and interpersonal position of readers in the science textbook. The results revealed that the majority of pictures used in the textbook represented human perception about the real object while the position of the readers is placed as receivers of the message from a more powerful person in the interpersonal meaning analysis.…”

Interpersonal Meaning: Verbal Text–Image Relations in Multimodal Science Texts for Young Children

“…The interpersonal meaning is particularly significant pedagogically, since it relates to a crucial interaction taking place in educational environments, namely the interaction between the learner and the teaching material [26]. More specifically, the selections made in the construction of teaching material regarding interpersonal meaning shape the role assigned to the reader and how s/he is positioned vis-à-vis the presented knowledge [3,[27][28][29]. The interpersonal meaning promoted by an educational material delineates the terms of the child's interaction with it and her/his knowledge construction, while it reflects the pedagogical positions that-deliberately or not-underly its design.…”