A Critical Visual Analysis of Gender Representation of ELT Materials from a Multimodal Perspective

Abstract

This content analysis study, employing a multimodal perspective and critical visual analysis, set out to analyze gender representations in Top Notch series, one of the highly used ELT textbooks in Iran. For this purpose, six images were selected from these series and analyzed in terms of ‘representational’, ‘interactive’ and ‘compositional’ modes of meanings. The result indicated that there are no stereotypical predictions of any genders, and that both female and male social actors were represented on an equal footing. The corollary of this critical image analysis was the implications which are of vital importance for material developers as well as those responsible for choosing language teaching in general and ELT materials in particular.

Keywords

• critical visual analysis
• ELT materials
• gender representation
• multimodal perspective