MESSAGE ABUNDANCY IN THE REPORT GENRE: VISUAL-VERBAL RELATION IN THE ENGLISH FOR NUSANTARA TEXTBOOK
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15408/ijee.v12i2.50007Keywords:
English for Nusantara; genre; message abundancy; visual-verbal relationsAbstract
Textbooks play a role in exposing learners to genres, demonstrating how texts are structured and used in social settings. One of the ways is through message abundancy, where concepts are expressed through multiple ways multiple times to enhance comprehension. Drawing on the framework of visual-verbal relations of meaning proposed by Daly and Unsworth (2011) and Unsworth (2006), the study explores how visual modes concurrent or complement verbal meanings or vice versa, contributing to message abundancy. Specifically, the study analyzes how this is achieved in the learning activities related to the report genre in the English for Nusantara (EfN) textbook Grade 7. Findings show that both concurrent meanings (equivalent and redundant) and complementary meanings (augmented) contribute to message abundancy. No divergent meaning was found, indicating that the verbal and visual modes did not contradict each other, as distracting details might hinder learning. This is supported through picture cues with wordboxes, model texts and hands-on activities, dialogues paired with comic strips, and genre stage tables combined with blank writing templates. Thus, through multimodal layering, the textbook reinforces meaning by visually re-expressing verbal modes, provides opportunities for matching, repeating, and applying language through visuals and sentence-building tasks, offers parallel input across modes, and situates language in context, strengthening recognition of vocabulary and the genre-specific features.
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