This paper conceptualizes the ELT textbook as a multimodal cultural artifact. It uses an innovative framework that combines Social Semiotic Multimodality with CDA in order to throw a new light onto the Glocal ELT textbook.
Interest in ELT materials and textbooks has traditionally been the domain of materials development. Literature on materials development is largely pedagogically based, and has an overriding objective of guiding the teacher (Tomlinson, 2001: 67). Recently, however, there has been a growing number of studies that research ELT textbooks from a critical perspective (Harwood, 2013; Rixon & Smith, 2012), in what constitute a “new and interesting” trend that is moving beyond “textbook evaluation” (Rixon & Smith 2012: 383). In this presentation, I align my research with this critical trend. My object of inquiry is the glocal ELT textbook (after Gray, 2002), being an under-researched new genre of global ELT textbooks, one that best reflects the effects of globalization on ELT textbook industry. Relying on a social constructionist paradigm and multimodal lenses, I take the semiotic texts in the textbooks as instantiations of larger discourses (Lemke, 1995). Therefore, I argue that changes at the level of the semiotic text in the localized editions entail changes at the level of discourse as well. To uncover those changes, I compare twelve books from three geographical editions of the same textbooks (a global edition, a regional edition for the Middle East and a local Edition for the Saudi market). The selection I carefully made to represent three levels of globality the textbooks construct. My approach is qualitative that combines Social Semiotic Multimodality with Critical Discourse Analysis. To operationalize this merger, Fairclough’s framework (1995) of the three stages of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is adopted in order to guide the transition from a micro to a macro analysis. The findings confirm that beyond aesthetics, the verbal and semiotic changes in the glocal editions are signifiers of changed larger discourses on sexuality, consumerism, juvenile agency, individual and family aspirations and gender identity construction.
