introduction

The Curriculum Standards emphasize the communicative purpose and thematic significance of oral and written discourse, and analyzing the thematic significance of English textbooks is crucial for students' English learning. Exploring the significance of the theme can help students demonstrate multicultural attitudes, understand and respect cultural differences, enhance cross-cultural communication skills, form correct values and positive emotional attitudes through critical thinking, and achieve the educational goals of the English curriculum. This article will explore the method of analyzing the thematic significance of primary school English textbooks based on the theory of inter symbol complementarity, in order to promote the cultivation of students' core competencies.

Theory of complementary symbols

This article introduces the application of the theory of complementary symbols in the analysis of thematic meaning in primary school English textbooks. As a carrier of culture and values, discourse's multimodal nature enables symbolic resources such as text and images to complement each other and jointly construct meaning. Royce (1999) proposed the theory of inter symbol complementarity, emphasizing the complementary relationship between textual and visual modalities at the semantic level. The author adopts this theoretical framework to analyze primary school English textbooks through three steps: 1) analyzing visual information symbols of images, including participants, activities, contexts, and attributes; 2) Annotate the relationship between image and text vocabulary, such as repetition, synonymy, antonymy, and collocation; 3) Explore the impact of graphic textual relationships on the presentation of thematic meaning, and examine how to jointly construct the story plot and theme. This analytical method helps to deepen the understanding of the thematic significance of textbook discourse.

Analysis and Exploration of the Theme Significance of Primary School English Textbooks

How do you feel about Unit 6 in the first volume of the sixth grade English textbook published by People's Education Press? Taking the reading and writing class as an example, this paper explores how to use the theory of cross symbol complementarity to analyze the thematic significance of primary school English textbooks. Firstly, through visual information symbol recognition, the main participants Robin and ants in the discourse, as well as their expressions, actions, and contexts, were analyzed, revealing the interactive relationship and emotional state between the two. Furthermore, the correspondence between images and text symbols was explored, demonstrating the complementarity between images and text in expressing thematic meanings through the repetition, antonyms, synonyms, and collocation of vocabulary. Finally, based on the theory of cross symbol complementarity, the thematic significance of the discourse was analyzed, and it was pointed out that the discourse belongs to the category of "human and self" themes, involving sub themes such as emotional regulation, difficulty resolution, and teamwork. Through the transformation of graphic and textual relationships, the theme of actively solving problems, collaborating with others, and regulating emotions is conveyed. Meanwhile, through the analysis of activity symbols, the importance of paying attention to safety and teamwork is emphasized, further strengthening the thematic significance of the discourse.

conclusion

Emphasis was placed on the requirements of the Curriculum Standards for students to learn English in real-life situations, and the importance of implicit thematic meanings in primary school English textbooks was pointed out. The article proposes a thematic meaning analysis method based on the theory of inter symbol complementarity, aiming to guide teachers to pay attention to the multimodal features of textbooks, help students deeply understand multimodal discourse, explore its educational value, establish the connection between content and thematic meaning, and promote students to form deep cognition and value judgments.