Abstract

Resources such as images, colors, sounds and actions have already been regarded as different types ‎of modes which fulfill the meaning-making. Multimodal discourse refers to two or more modes ‎working together for the meaning-making of the whole discourse. The paper conducts a multimodal ‎discourse analysis of Persian language-learning textbook from ideational aspects. Persian language-‎learning textbooks give almost equal weight to both their pictures and verbal texts. The study of ‎ideational aspect focuses on factors such as participants, processes (action, reactional, etc.), ‎circumstance, etc. This article has a two-fold objective: (1) to discuss how the system of transitivity ‎in Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (1996) for the analysis of images is related to the ‎system of transitivity in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (2004) and (2) to investigate how ‎multimodal texts combine in meaning production. In terms of a theoretical discussion about visual ‎language, the study of Visual Grammar is relevant, considering the need for investigating the ways ‎this kind of grammar can contribute for language teaching. The analysis reveals the pictures’ ‎functions in meaning interpretation and explains the relations between the pictures and the verbal ‎texts‎.