Analyzing Images/Texts Relations in English Teaching Textbooks

The aim of this descriptive-analytic article is to investigate the relations between images and their related texts in American English File and Cutting edge ELT textbook series based on the frameworks of Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics and Kress and van Leeuwen’s semiotics. These theories offer a way to understand meaning in multimodal English teaching textbooks by defining the relationships between images and their related texts. This article suggests four points through investigating three meanings (ideational, interpersonal, and textual) in the images and texts. Firstly, the investigation of the ideational meaning suggests that the relationships between images and texts are summarized in two groups including expansion and projection. Secondly, the analysis of the interpersonal meaning indicates that these relationships are summarized in two kinds of meanings, including interactive and evaluative. Thirdly, the analysis of the textual meaning shows that these relations are divided in new/given information and real/ideal information. Finally, this study highlights the importance of these semantic relations to understand multimodal texts and their impacts on the readers.