Identity And Multimodality Of Cultural Content In Elt Coursebooks For Yls

Abstract

Globalisation has led to changing identities and relations between inner and outside worlds. The factors mediating in this exchange are languages and cultures. Bilingual young learners (YLs) develop their identity negotiating between the native and target language culture. They experience it in learning/teaching materials where meaning is communicated through verbal and visual modes. The project aims to investigate identity representations advocated in English language teaching (ELT) materials as the semiotic reality for YLs. Two major questions are designated: How do visual and verbal modalities reflect identity in ELT coursebooks for YLs? What is the image-text relationship in the cultural content for identity representation? The project involves multimodal discourse analysis (MDA). The qualitative approach focuses on the imagetext relationship of the cultural content in four series of ELT coursebooks for YLs. The image-text relationships known as intermodality indicates how these modes interact to construct content for identity representation into focus. The project hopes to improve materials development.