Multimodal E-Textbook Development for the Course of Intercultural Communication of National Image

Introduction

Textbook as an important carrier for teaching (Gray, 2013; Graves, 2019), is considered an essential learning tool in physical and virtual classrooms, no matter if it is the core of class discourse or acts as a guide for the teaching topics (Rockinson-Szapkiw et al., 2013). In the digital age, stimulated by the rapid development of information technology and the adoption of various digital and mobile learning tools in education, the development of electronic textbooks (e-textbooks) has appeared and becomes a new tendency. Publishers are developing more digital learning resources for online teaching and learning. The e-books are designed to facilitate the process of reading, making it more convenient and ubiquitous (Folb et al., 2011). With e-textbooks, students’ learning can go beyond the school and classroom through various handheld devices, such as laptops, tablets, e-readers, and smartphones. Hence, their self-learning can also be stirred up. Today’s university students belong to “Generation Z”, who were born after 1995 and grew up in the context of fast development and the widespread of information technology. “Internet +” has become the main field of their innovative practice (Qian, Zhou, 2021). Rockinson-Szapkiw et al. (2013) point out that a growing number of university students choose e-textbooks as an alternative to traditional textbooks.

Under the background of the Belt and Road initiative, locally grounded, globally minded intercultural communicators are badly needed in China. Most existing intercultural communication textbooks are compiled by experts in the fields of journalism and communication in Chinese, mainly for students in the School of Journalism or Communication. They focus on the theoretical application of communication but fail to pay sufficient attention to the overall cultivation of foreign language skills, discourse analysis, and intercultural communication competence. In this situation, various high-quality intercultural communication e-textbooks in English have been successively published for English majors or other English learners, especially by two of the most influential foreign language education presses in China, i.e., Beijing Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press and Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press in recent years, aiming to promote students’ understanding of cross-linguistic and cultural differences and cultivate their intercultural communication competence. However, most of these textbooks only focus on knowledge teaching and language skills training, such as listening, speaking, reading, and writing, but cover few linguistic and intercultural communication research theories. From the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), it can be seen that the number of researches on national image and intercultural communication is increasing year by year, among which, the researches from the perspective of linguistics and discourse analysis appear to be one of the frontiers. Taking national image, intercultural communication, and discourse analysis as subject search words, it can be observed that in theme distribution, high-frequency themes include multimodal research, comparative research, systemic functional linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and so on. The same trend appears in the themes of recent national social science projects and academic conferences. For example, in recent years, many academic conferences have been held at home and abroad that combine intercultural communication of national image with discourse analysis or translation research to promote further integration of intercultural communication and foreign language teaching and research. In the setting of new liberal arts construction in Chinese mainland universities, interdisciplinary teaching and research have become an inevitable tendency. In e-textbook development, theoretical foundation, education policy, and digital technology are of equal importance. Therefore, how to combine theories, knowledge, and skills from both disciplines of foreign languages and intercultural communication is a key issue in the development of e-textbook on intercultural communication for English majors and learners. This study will take the course “Intercultural Communication of National Image” as an example to investigate e-textbook development for intercultural communication courses.