Systemic-functional multimodal discourse analysis of english language coursebooks for high school in public education

Abstract

Coursebooks for Brazilian public primary and seconday schools for free are still a new reality in the Brazilian context of the English language classes. Although students have the constitutional right to learn a foreign language, the Brazilian Coursebook National Program started distributing English textbooks to all Brazilian secondary public schools only recently. As this pedagogical material becomes of paramount importance for teaching and learning in the public educational context, it is worth investigating it taking into account recent research in applied linguistics. This article analyses the two most adopted coursebooks in Brazilian high schools, High Up and Way to Go, approved by the 2015 National Program. Our analysis takes a multimodal systemic functional perspective to comprehend the interactions between verbiages and images in these multifaceted and complex instruments of socialization (BUNZEN, 2008). Based on the systemic approach by Painter, Martin e Unsworth (2013), we analysed the corpus from three main perspectives: intermodal integration, framing and focus to understand the ways the visual spaces have been composed. We believe that studies like the one reported in this text can help English language teachers understand the multimodal aspects of the coursebooks they teach with so as to improve their pedagogical practices.