A Multimodal Study on the Image-text Relations in Medical English Textbook

With the advancement of globalization and information technology, the importance of multimodal teaching and learning of medical English has become increasingly prominent. Based on Martinic and Salway's status relations system, this paper studies the image-text relations of the medical English textbook "Medical Terminology: An Illustrated Guide"(The 8th edition)(2017). All the 256 images in this textbook were analyzed and classified according to the status relations. It has found that in each part as well as the whole textbook, from the perspective of the status relations, the complementary image-text relation is the most frequently identified, which is in accordance with the gradual complexity of the textbook. The setting of the relationship between images and texts in the textbook has a certain rationality and scientificity, which shows that the reasonable preparation and selection of images can better assist medical students in learning medical English terminologies, and can also provide beneficial guide for the compilers to design the medical English textbooks.