TTLA: Language expressing children's characters in some Vietnamese and English children's comic books using multimodal discourse analysis method

1. Full name of PhD student: Nguyen Thi Dieu Ha 2. Gender: Female
3. Date of birth: March 25, 1985 4. Place of birth: Thanh Hoa
5. Decision on recognition of PhD students: Decision No. 2775/2020/QD-XHNV dated December 31, 2020 of the President of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University, Hanoi.
6. Changes in the training process (if any): Decision to change the thesis topic from "Comparison of the language expressing children's images in English and Vietnamese children's comics in Vietnam today: a multimodal discourse analysis" to "The language expressing children's characters in some Vietnamese and English children's comics using the multimodal discourse analysis method" according to Decision No. 4284/QD-XHNV dated October 26, 2023 of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, VNU Hanoi.
7. Thesis topic: Language expressing children's characters in some Vietnamese and English children's comic books using multimodal discourse analysis method
8. Major: Comparative Linguistics 9. Code: 9229020.03
10. Scientific advisor: Associate Professor, Dr. Lam Quang Dong
11. Summary of new results of the thesis:
11.1. Purpose and research objects of the thesis
- The study aims to find out how children's images are expressed through language and images in Vietnamese and English children's comics.
- The research data is the language used to express and evaluate children's characters and images used to evaluate children's characters in popular Vietnamese and English children's comic books.
11.2. Research methods used
- Qualitative and quantitative methods, descriptive methods, comparative methods, statistical techniques, classification
11.3. Main results and conclusions
Linguistic analyses of child characters show a richness in the number and frequency of adjectives and verbs describing child characters. While the language describing this character in Vietnamese is rich in expressive nuances, implicit and full of reduplicated words, the English corpus shows that the language is explicit, direct and clear. Research on the language of character evaluation also shows that child characters in English stories are mostly (more than 90%) evaluated positively, while child characters in Vietnamese stories are evaluated much more negatively. While in Vietnamese, children are often evaluated by older people (parents, grandparents, older brothers and other adults), children are the ones evaluating themselves in English works.
Considering the relationship between evaluative language and evaluative images of children's characters in Vietnamese and English children's comics according to the classification of Development, Extension, and Enhancement and Projection, the study shows clear similarities and differences between the way the textual language and the visual illustrations complement and clarify each other in the Vietnamese and English corpus. The results of the analysis of the relationship between the textual language and the visual images show the closeness and high connection between the language and the visual images in the two research data sets.
The research results of the thesis show that the content depicted in Vietnamese and English comics is consistent with the cultural values ​​and messages about appropriate behaviors, qualities and attitudes of children's characters in the stories in particular and of children in society in general. The author recommends that authors and publishers pay more attention to the message of accompanying adults and have more warm expressions (through words and non-words) to be more consistent with the changing role of adults in raising and accompanying children, to keep up with the changes taking place in real life.
This study has the following theoretical and practical contributions.
Theoretically: This study contributes to the understanding of the use of the PTDNPP and NPCNHT theoretical frameworks in the analysis of language and images, and shows the feasibility of these theoretical frameworks in analyzing different meaning-making resources to gain a deeper understanding of text types. The analysis provides empirical findings in the field of multimodal research on children's images portrayed in Vietnamese and English children's comics. This approach is relatively new and to the author's knowledge, up to now in Vietnam there has been no research following the same direction on the same data or similar data. Another theoretical contribution of the thesis is to build a list of criteria for selecting works suitable for young readers to bring age-appropriate values.
In practice: Comics are a source of entertainment and development of moral values ​​for children. The author wants to contribute a voice to evaluate the incompatibility and inconsistency between language and images in Vietnamese and English comics that are popular in the Vietnamese market today. Thereby, the thesis contributes ideas and scientific basis to improve the quality, enhance the educational value and effectiveness of comics on culture and language for children's development as well as adjust the inappropriate elements of foreign/English comics imported into Vietnam today as well as of Vietnamese comics themselves. The study also provides suggestions on how to exploit this multimodal text in educating young readers.
12. Further research directions:
This study is a multi-method study, so the author has only limited the study to 25 Vietnamese works and 27 English works to be able to deeply analyze the content and form of expressing the evaluation of children characters; but because of that, the research results are not generalizable enough to be able to give more representative results with the depiction of children in particular and the lessons hidden in comics in general with children's comics currently on the market. If conditions permit, the author would like to expand the study with more works, and possibly study works from other collective cultures (China, Korea) and other individual cultures (Europe).
In addition to wanting to expand the research object, the author also wants to expand the scope of the research. If in this study the author only stops at studying the epithets evaluating child characters in the linguistic part and the perspective of evaluating child characters (in the visual part), in the following studies the author wants to study other aspects of interpersonal meaning such as address (how the text addresses the reader), social distance (social distance) and involvement (the level of interaction of the reader with the performing participant) with both the linguistic and visual parts (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006).
Finally, to understand how a character is constructed, the author also intends to study the child character in both the representational meaning through the study of actions, participants and the whole; the compositional meaning with verbal and visual elements; in addition to the interpersonal meaning as in this thesis.
13. Publications related to the thesis:

 

INFORMATION ON DOCTORAL THESIS
 

- The study aims to find out how the portrayal of child characters is depicted through language and images in Vietnamese and English children's picture books.
- The research data is the language describing and evaluating children's characters and images evaluating children's characters in popular Vietnamese and English children's picture books.

- Qualitative and quantitative methods, descriptive methods, contrastive analysis method, descriptive statistical techniques

- The analysis of the language depicting child characters shows the richness in number and frequency of adjectives and verbs describing children's characters. While the language describes this character in Vietnamese is rich in expressive nuances, connotative and has many lexical phenomena, the English corpus shows that the language is explicit, direct and clear.
- The analysis of adjectives and verbs evaluating children's characters shows that children's characters in English stories are mostly (more than 90%) evaluated positively, while children's characters in Vietnamese stories are evaluated more negatively. If in Vietnamese, children are often evaluated by their elders (parents, grandparents, brothers and other adults), children are the ones who evaluate themselves in English works.
- In analyzing the images of child characters, those in Vietnamese stories tend to be aloof/distant and alienated from readers/viewers. Another highlight is that the children characters in Vietnamese and English stories are mostly seen at the same level as the reader's eyes, showing an attitude of respect and equality with the reader. However, children in Vietnamese comics are judged more (with 33.1% top-down perspective), 10 times as much as these characters in English comics (only 3.1%). .
- Regarding the relationship between evaluative language and evaluative images, the study shows similarities and clear differences between the written language and the visual illustrations, which complement and clarify each other in the Vietnamese and English corpuses. The results of analyzing the relationship between text and images show the close connection between language and images in the two research materials.
Conclusions
The research results of the thesis show that the contents portrayed in Vietnamese and English comics are consistent with cultural values ​​and messages about appropriate behaviors, qualities and attitudes of children's characters in stories, in particular, and of children in society, in general. The author recommends that book writers and publishers pay more attention to the message of adult companionship and have more warm expressions (through verbal and non-verbal) to better adapt to the change in the role of adults in raising and accompanying children, to keep up with the changes taking place in real life.
- Thesis's major contributions:
Theoretical contributions: This study contributes to the understanding of the use of the Critical Discourse Analysis and Systemic Functional Grammar theoretical frameworks in the analysis of language and images, and shows the considerations of these theoretical frameworks in analyzing different meaning-making resources to gain a deeper understanding of text types. The analysis provides empirical findings in the field of multimodal research on children's images portrayed in Vietnamese and English children's comics. This approach is relatively new and to the author's knowledge, up to now in Vietnam there has been no research following the same direction on the same data or similar data. Another theoretical contribution of the thesis is to develop a list of criteria for selecting works suitable for young readers to appropriate values.
Practical contributions: Comics are a source of entertainment and develop moral values ​​for children. The author wants to contribute a voice to evaluate the incompatibility and inconsistency between language and images in Vietnamese and English comics that are popular in the Vietnamese market today. Thereby, the thesis contributes suggestions and scientific basis to improve the quality, enhance the educational value and effectiveness of comics on culture and language for children's development as well as adjust the inappropriate elements of foreign/English comics imported into Vietnam today as well as of Vietnamese comics themselves. The study also provides suggestions on how to exploit this multimodal text in educating young readers.

This study adopts a multimodal analysis approach, so the author has only limited the study to 25 Vietnamese works and 27 English works to be able to deeply analyze the content and form of expressing the evaluation of children's characters; but because of that, the research results are not representative with the depiction of children in particular and the lessons hidden in comics in general with children's comics currently on the market. If conditions permit, the author wants to expand the study with more works, and can study works from other collective cultures (China, Korea) and other individual counterparts (Europe). In addition to the extension of the research subjects, the author also wants to expand the scope of the study. If in this study the author only studies the evaluative features of both language and images, in the following studies the author wants to investigate other aspects of interpersonal meaning such as address (how the text addresses the reader), social distance and involvement (the level of interaction between the reader and the performing participant) with both the linguistic and visual parts (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006).
Finally, to understand how a character is constructed, the author also intends to study the child character in both the representational meaning through studying actions and participants; the textual/compositional meaning with verbal and visual elements; in addition to the interpersonal meaning as in this thesis.

Nguyen Thi Dieu Ha (2024), “The interface of words and images in Vietnamese and English children's picture books in depicting child characters”, International Conference on Interdisciplinary Research in Linguistics and Language Education, Hue University of Languages ​​and International Studies, Hue University, pp. 804-816 - ISBN 978-604-489-031-9