Visual images and image-text relations in ELT textbooks for young learners

A noteworthy change in China’s newly released national English language curriculum standards is the inclusion of ‘viewing’ ability, i.e., the skill of acquiring information conveyed in multimodal discourses like graphics, photos and animation (MOE, 2022a). To investigate how ELT textbooks are compiled to foster learners’ viewing ability, we conducted a descriptive content analysis of two ELT textbook series (N1 = 12, N2 = 6) for young learners. Informed by Fingeret’s classification of graphics (2012) and Martinec and Salway’s framework of image-text relations (2005), we coded a total of 7182 visual images to examine how different types of visual images and image-text relations were utilised in terms of frequency and distribution in the two textbook series. Results show that both textbook series feature the use of diverse visual images and the Chinese ELT textbook series exclusively use cartoons, whereas the global ELT textbooks use photos in addition to cartoons. Regarding image-text status relations, equal relations constitute a larger percentage than unequal relations, and the expansion logico-sematic relations appear much more frequently than the projection relations. Implications for dealing with visual images and image-text relations in ELT textbooks for young learners are suggested in the conclusion section.