A Visual Analysis of English Language Textbooks: Celebrities’ Role as Cultural Figures

This paper seeks to probe cultural agendas pertaining to the images of celebrities in the widely-used English language textbooks. In fact, while visual analysis has solidified its position in ELT (e.g. Hurst, ۲۰۱۴; Mitsikopoulou, ۲۰۱۵; Romney, ۲۰۱۲; Taylor-Mendes, ۲۰۰۹) and caused the pendulum to swing away from the grammatical or textual content to the visual presentation (Giaschi, ۲۰۰۰), research into celebrities as the cultural representatives has been a barely touched issue. To address this gap, the researchers, drawing on Kachru’s (۱۹۸۵) orthodox model of the usage of English across the globe, examined the images of celebrities in four widely-used English language textbook series. In so doing, the terms depiction and mention (Toprak & Aksoyalp, ۲۰۱۴) were taken as a yardstick to pinpoint the type of intersection between the text and the image.  Further, the images were thematically explored, which notably indicated the images relating to the field of media were the far most common theme in the English language textbooks. Lastly, it was revealed that whereas the images of the inner-circle outnumbered all, the images of the expanding circle surprisingly outnumbered those of the outer circle, an outcome which could point to linguistic schizophrenia (Kachru, ۱۹۹۲) as the main reason.

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Keywords: Celebrities , circles of EIL , culture , linguistic schizophrenia , text-accompanied images