Multimodal Co-Selection of Grammatical Tenses in Chinese Primary School EFL Textbooks: The Case of Verb be

This paper delves into the intricate co-selection patterns between four distinct verb tense categories required by the Curriculum and three kinds of inter-semiotic relationships in Chinese primary school textbooks for English as a foreign language (EFL). Informed by the corpus-based co-selection analysis and the multimodal analysis in textbooks, it proposes a corpus-assisted approach to evaluating the construction of verb tenses via multiple modes. An exhaustive analysis of a series of textbooks shows that the most frequent verb “be” tends to signify the temporal shifts in a parallel inter-semiotic relationship. However, the configuration biplot derived from the cross-tabulation between verb tenses and inter-semiotic relationships, complemented by correspondence analysis in R, unveils a more nuanced pattern of co-selecting the multiple modes. This pattern displays that a preferential pairing of each inter-semiotic relationship with two specific verb tense types, exemplified through illustrative cases of co-selection. The findings underscore the importance for textbook compilers to critically consider the interplay of multiple modes when representing grammatical tenses. The proposed approach and insights offer valuable guidance for content analysis and the design of multimodal texts in EFL textbooks, thereby enhancing their pedagogical effectiveness.