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Article published In: Language Teaching for Young Learners
Vol. 5:2 (2023) ► pp.196–216

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

 | Fudan University
 | Fudan University
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 6 July 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ltyl.00035.zhu
Abstract
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 (Ministry of Education (MOE). (2022a). National English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education. Beijing Normal University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). 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 (Martinec, R. & Salway, A. (2005). A system for image-text relations in new (and old) media. Visual Communication, (3), 337–371. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), 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 uses 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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Working definition of visual images
    • 2.2Visual images in ELT textbooks
    • 2.3Types of visual images
    • 2.4Image-text relations
    • 2.5The present study
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Sample
    • 3.2Coding schemes
    • 3.3Coding procedures
    • 3.4Data analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Frequency and proportion of visual image type
    • 4.2Distribution of visual image type
    • 4.3Frequency and proportion of image-text status relation
    • 4.4Distribution of image-text relation type
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Visual image types and their distributions
    • 5.2Image-text types and their distributions
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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