Revisiting Visual-Verbal Intersemiotic Complementarity: A Multimodal Case Study of a Literary Chinese Study Guide and Its Pedagogical Implications on Chinese as a Second Language

Abstract

This paper revisits the concept of visual-verbal intersemiotic complementarity (Royce 1999a, 1999b, 2007) and examines the multimodal relations between images and texts in a Literary Chinese (LC, or wenyan, the spoken language of ancient China and written language until early 1920s) study guide targeting at local senior secondary students in Hong Kong, Learning Literary Chinese With Fun (Quwei Xue Guwen) (Fong & Ma 2015). Adopting Kress & Van Leeuwen’s (1996) grammar of visual design and Unsworth’s (2001, 2007) framework of multiliteracies in the classroom, the current research is a multimodal case study of Learning Literary Chinese With Fun grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Data analysis revealed that three modes, namely LC, Standard Modern Chinese Translation (SMCT) and Multiframe Cartoon (MFC), were intricately presented in a complementary manner. The “hidden” grammatical elements (e.g. subject), rhetorical devices (e.g. inversion), cultural contexts (e.g. rituals and artefacts) in the vertical LC original texts above the cartoon panels were in turn explained by the SMCT off-frame chapter introductions and in-frame dialogues and narratives, and illustrated by the three- to five-frame MFC. Such intersemiotic complementarity between the texts (LC and SMCT) and the images (MFC) has obvious pedagogical implications particularly in times of policy change when high-level Chinese as a second language (CSL) learners are required to learn LC as a compulsory part of the current curriculum, given that it facilitates understanding of the set texts at different levels of reading behaviours (Rose & Martin 2012; Shum 2014) with the shift in tenor and mode.