Fahim,Farima

Ideologies in Young Learners’ Textbooks: A Multimodal Analysis of Super Minds Textbook Starter’s Images

Children construct meaning through images an‎d learn from them (Sovič & Hus, 2015 as cited in Munir & Warmansyah, 2023). By looking through the literature, it was noticed that investigations on teaching materials for preschool children specifically English textbooks were insufficient. To fill this gap, this study offers an in-depth analysis of the illustrations of a young learners’ English textbook named Super Minds. This English textbook was chosen according to its broad implication around the world. These series of international English textbooks have been published in second edition by Cambridge University Press (Puchta & Lewis-Jones, 2024). This study investigated ideologies that could be derived from 191 images in young learners’ textbook. In order to discover the ideologies through visual modes of language, this study performed a Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) based on Kress an‎d van Leeuwen’s (2006) framework for visual grammar. This framework embraced representational, interactive an‎d compositional meanings. In this inquiry, representational meaning of images was inspected through a qualitative content analysis. Representational meaning illustrates participants, processes, an‎d circumstances. To do the study, images were classified according to the framework (i.e., images with the same themes were counted as one) an‎d their percentage in each category was calculated. Next, the ideologies were derived from the obtained data. The findings of the study revealed that children were represented more than adults. The textbook paid attention to representation of different racial groups an‎d gender equality. Also, Super Minds textbook depicted images about children’s everyday experiences such as animals an‎d objects. Moreover, the textbook’s images outlined equal attention to science an‎d math in addition to other areas. The represented images could increase young learners’ attentiveness, spatial intelligence an‎d socialization. The results can help teachers an‎d material developers pay more careful attention to the ideologies expressed through English textbooks especially young learners.