Resumés in English from the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis

Abstract

Resumés play a crucial role in individuals’ careers; hence how to create an eye-catching resumé is always a big concern. This article aims to discover discourse features of resumés in English from the perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA). It focuses on describing layout features, lexical choices, grammar features and the image-language relations in 50 English resumés based on the qualitative method. There are combinations of linguistic and visual elements in these resumés. The findings show five general layout sections in English resumés and four main patterns. This study indicates verbs, adjectives and compounds used in expressing ideas and rely on the transitivity system of Systemic Functional Grammar to analyze grammatical features. Additionally, three types of image-language relations are identified: Clarification, Exposition, Augmentation. It is expected that the results of this study can be useful for writing resumés in English as well as for teaching and learning English language.

Keywords

• english resumés
• layout
• lexical choices
• grammatical features
• image-language relation