The semiotic construal of attitudinal curriculum goals: Evidence from EFL textbooks in China

Recent reforms to curriculum standards in China have highlighted for the first time ‘emotion and attitude education’. This new focus is the pedagogic backdrop to the research reported in this article–an exploration of how evaluative stance is construed through the co-deployment of linguistic and visual resources in primary and secondary textbooks for teaching English as a foreign language in China. In particular, this study considers language-image complementarity and co-instantiation. It is found that linguistic and visual appraisal resources play essential roles in realizing various attitudinal curriculum goals, guiding students to the putative reading and in the joint construction of texts. Working towards an ontogenetic view on the attitudinal accumulation, it identifies an attitudinal shift from an emotional release to a more institutionalized type of evaluation as students advance through the school years.