A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Pictures in ELT Textbooks: Modes of Communication in Focus

Abstract

There is a tight nexus between visual literacy and textbook picture representations. This is of paramount importance when textbooks in general and ELT textbooks, in particular, are under question. To conduct a visual and verbal discourse analysis based on modes of communication, ELT textbook pictures were analyzed under the assumption that visual and verbal discourse interacts with reflected modes of communication. To this end, 50 ELT textbook pictures were used as the corpus and analyzed according to KvL's (2006) visual images analytical strategies in multimodal texts and Halliday’s (1985) transitivity system for verbal analysis of textbook pictures. The analysis of multimodal resources revealed that the analyzed visual images were used to represent non-human images; close-up images, frontal images, left-right compositions were the most frequent visual modes in the selected pictures. In the case of verbal mode, the relational main-type and verbal minor-type level with 39% and 2% were the most and least frequent verbal strategies, respectively. The findings might have significant theoretical and pedagogical implications for scholars, L2 teachers, and ELT textbook designers to consider the potential of using multimodal resources for non-pedagogical purposes while integrating textbook visual images and verbal strategies to create meanings. Keywords: Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Transitive System’s Processes, Visual Images Interpretive Strategies, Modes of Communication, ELT Textbooks.