This paper identifies the discursive changes around the textual and semiotic construction of gender identity in one ELT textbook series as content is relocated from the global to the regional, and then to the national context.
One effect of the spread of English language teaching in wider world contexts on the ELT textbooks industry is the birth of the ‘global’ ELT textbook and later the ‘glocal’ ELT textbook (Gray, 2002). While research into the global genre has shown an overall improvement in the representations of women (Gray, 2002 &2007), there is no reports on how these images sustain or change when the global textbooks are localized for different world contexts. In this paper, I will problematize the act of localizing the cultural content of global ELT textbooks from a gender perspective. I will compare the multimodal representations of human Represented Participants in three levels of globality a single ELT textbook constructs. These levels are realized in a corpus taken from three editions of the same textbook: a global edition, a regional edition for the Middle East and a local edition for Saudi Arabia. The paper will address two questions: what does it mean to be a woman and a man in the global context, the regional context, and the local context? And ultimately, what does it mean to localize the representation of gender identity in a global ELT textbook? In order to answer these questions, I developed an analytical framework that is sensitive to the use of color (Van Leewen, 2011), layout (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1998), image (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996) and written language (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) in the semiotic representation of Represented Participants in ELT textbooks. I integrated the multimodal analysis into Fairclough’s (1995) model of CDA. The findings report major variations in both the representations of gender identity and the discourses that mediate them in the global and the glocal textbooks, challenging conclusions reached by previous studies of global ELT textbooks.
