An analysis of intrasemiotic and intersemiotic relations of textual and visual modes for the topic of Forces in Namibian Grade 8 school science textbooks

Abstract

Science education in Namibia receives much attention from the Government of the Republic of Namibia, but learners’ performance remains poor in Physical Science topics such as Forces and Matter. Although the majority of Namibian learners rely heavily on school textbooks as learning aids, there is a paucity of research on the nature of their textual meaning potential. School science textbooks are multimodal with semiotic modes such as the textual/written and visual modes. The Systemic Functional Linguistics’ textual metafunction focuses on the devices or relations these modes could enact within or across each other for producing a cohesive piece of text. Sense-relations across the textual and visual modes in school science textbooks potentially contribute to strengthen cohesion and thus greater textual meaning-potential than afforded by sense relations within these modes alone. This study builds on the discourse perspective on science education by analysing the intrasemiotic and intersemiotic sense relations within and across the textual and visual modes for the topic of Forces in three Namibian Grade 8 Physical Sciences textbooks. It entailed a qualitative case study framed by Systemic Functional Linguistics more generally, and the notion of intersemiotic complimentarity in particular. The results from this study indicate which sense relations were currently playing a stronger role in strengthening cohesion for the topic of Forces. Synonymy and repetition were found to be the most frequently-occurring sense relations within the textual mode while antonymy, collocation and synonymy were the most frequently-occurring sense relations within the visual mode. The main finding of the study was that intersemiotic complimentarity in Physical Sciences textbooks contributed to strengthened cohesion and thus textual meaning potential in the topic of Forces through the sense relations of intersemiotic collocation and intersemiotic repetition. The study recommends that textbook developers strengthen currently under-utilised relations within and across modes, in order to strengthen textual meaning-potential for the topic of Forces. The study also recommended that the Namibian science textbook publication criteria should include textual-visual intersemiotic complementarity as one of the evaluation criteria for school science textbooks.