A Study of the Representation of Social Actors in Touchstone Series: A Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective

This study is an attempt to interrogate different ways in which social actors are represented through two independent (linguistic & visual) modes of communication in EFL textbooks in light of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approaches. For the purpose of this study, gender related features were identified according to the categories introduced in Van Leeuwen's (2008) and Kress and Van Leeuwen's (2006) frameworks in Touchstone series. The results of this study indicate that male and female participants were represented differently through both visual and linguistic modes of representation. For the case of linguistic gender representations, it was found that a female oriented ideology has been practiced through this series. Visual gender representation results, on the other hand, showed that males were stereotypically represented as more salient and idealized participants than females. The findings of this research can provide teachers, learners, curriculum designers or course book developers with potential implications.