Multimodal Design of EFL Textbooks: A Social Semiotic Multimodal Approach
Abstract
In recent years media of wider communication and dissemination are becoming increasingly visual. It seems that there are many more images than before and that all types of texts are becoming multimodal. The roles of these images are no longer limited to embellish the linguistic text or reinforce its message but extend to include additional meanings. As means of cultural diffusion, EFL textbooks are no exception to this increasing multimodality. Many studies show that these textbooks which teach English, a subject that supposedly concerns itself with the modes of writing and speech, include an increasing myriad of visual images becoming thus multimodal texts. Therefore the objective of this paper is to consider the “visual turn” in three Algerian EFL textbooks and to see to which extent they adhere to the growing visual culture. To conduct this study, we adopt the social semiotic theory that accounts for the visual design thanks to its multimodal toolkit. We will consider different modes of representation adopted in order to understand the multimodal development in the following textbooks; Think it Over (1989), Comet (2001), and New Prospects (2007).
Keywords: visual design, EFL textbooks, social semiotics, modes of representation, multimodality.
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