Rather than relying on uniform products, global media brands are increasingly catering for individual markets through customization services. The end product is an interesting amalgam that carries traces of what is predesignated as global and what is latter decided as local in the process of localization. The realization of the process of localizing global cultural products is multimodal par excellence. Beyond aesthetics considerations, I argue that the changes in the modal level of customization in the production of glocal cultural products is ideological as much as ‘motivated’ (Kress, 1993).

In this presentation, I will share a framework I have developed to probe the modal changes around identity construction in glocal print media, specifically glocal language teaching textbooks. The framework combines social semiotic taxonomies for layout (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1998), image (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996) and color (Van Leeuwen, 2011) with Hallidayan grammar (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) for the analysis of verbal language. In order to move beyond mere descriptive research, I incorporated my multimodal analysis into Fairclough’s (1995) three stages of CDA. The corpus consists of 12 books taken from three geographical editions that represent three levels of glocalization: global, regional and local editions. In this presentation, I will focus on some of the methodological challenges in developing and working with a multimodal framework, such as transcribing multimodal data and working with image-based transcription, computer-assisted annotation and building multimodal templates. I will also report on some of the issues around standards in qualitative multimodal studies such as representativeness, corpus construction and triangulation.

Fairclough, N. (1995): Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. Harlow: Longman.

Halliday, M. A. & Matthiesen, C.M. (2014): An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Routledge.

Kress, G. (1993): Against arbitrariness: The social production of the sign as a foundational issue in critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society 4 (2), 169-191

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (1996): Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge.

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (1998): Front pages: The (critical) analysis of newspaper layout. in: Bell, A. & Garrett, P. (eds.) Approaches to Media Discourse. Oxford: Blackwell, 186-219.

Van Leeuwen, T. (2011): The Language of Colour: An Introduction. London: Routledge.