Evaluation of visual elements of "Mina" series based on the framework of Kress and van Leeuwen's model (2006)

Evaluating educational materials is a process that includes evaluating the value of a set of educational materials and judging its impact on users. One of the important topics in evaluation of materials in second language learning is the impact of visual elements. The "Mina" book series has been designed in four volumes for teaching Persian language to non-Persian speakers. This research has examined the visual elements of this books in the framework of kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) model. The status, importance, interpretation and suitability of the images with the educational goals of the Persian teaching were considered in the present research. Statistical calculations showed that 2.28 images are used on each page of the books, which is higher compared to similar researches and indicates the greater visual richness of the "Mina" book series. The ratio of the number of images to the number of pages goes from 3.61 in the first book to 0.44 in the fourth book, which shows that the authors emphasized the important role of images in language teaching at lower language profieciency levels. Also, the number of informational images and its comparison with illustrated and decorative images shows that 61.12% of the book's images are informational images and the book's images seek to attract the audience and engage them more effectively with the linguistic parts of the book. The pictures in the book are realistic to attract the audience's attention so the images have a suitable function related to the educational goals of the book.