An Approach to the Study of Textbook Images and Transactional Processes

Dallas

Conferencia; American Association of Applied Linguistics Conference; 2013

American Association of Applied Linguistics

Most of the studies describing the type of images that educational textbooks contain, have adopted an ´objective´ approach to research without finding connections between the features studied (Weiten, 1988; Quereshi, 1981). Still less work has been done relating elements of the visual domain with others that have to do with the final outcome of L2 instruction, namely the facilitation of interaction between participants. This paper follows a multimodal approach (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, 2006) to language within the Functional Linguistics perspective of M. A. K. Halliday (1978) and it presents a method for extracting and coding for textbooks images and proposes an analysis that draws on correlations between variables. It also illustrates their complementation in a pilot study of images from two units of an EFL textbook widely used in elementary schools in Argentina. A total of 120 tokens were coded for on a grid prepared for this study. The criteria for selection were all images (photographs, drawings, digital images) of animated entities (human, animal and imaginary). All images were coded for the presence of Transaction vs No-transaction as well as several other social (ethnicity, gender) and design (vertical and horizontal angles) variables. Fifty-nine percent (n=124/210) of all the tokens displayed some kind of transactional process. A multivariate analysis (using GoldVarbX, by Sankoff, Tagliamonte, & Smith, 2005) was carried out to see the probability weight that certain factor groups presented in favoring the transaction between entities. Further results and implications for materials evaluation and design will be discused as well as the impact that visual learning materials may have on the learner.