Post by Viridiana G.

When I was doing my master's in Applied Linguistics for English Language Teaching, my thesis topic was how women are represented in English textbooks. I wanted to study it through Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), drawing on Norman Fairclough's framework and on David Machin and Andrea Mayr's How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A Multimodal Introduction. The "multimodal" part mattered to me because a textbook doesn't communicate through words alone: it communicates through who appears in the photo, who's at the centre and who's at the margin, who holds a profession and who holds the baby, who is shown face-on and who in profile. Every one of those design choices carries ideology, even when no one made them in bad faith. And I think it's not only about how many women are represented, but which women. When the visual "default" stays white, middle-class and heteronormative, the students who don't see themselves there get a quiet message about who belongs in the world that language describes. An intersectional lens — multiethnic, not just about gender — completely changes the reading. Today, as an ELT editor, that research stopped being theory and became part of my daily work. In developmental and content editing, or when briefing picture research, I don't just assess whether an activity or a text works pedagogically: I also ask who it's representing and who it's leaving out. I've learned that working with an intersectional lens isn't "adding diversity" to tick a box — it's representing the world more honestly, and it's part of the responsibility of those of us who make the materials people learn from. I'd love to hear from others in editing, materials development and teaching: how intentional is representation in the books we work with? — Further reading (APA 7): Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Polity Press. Machin, D., & Mayr, A. (2012). How to do critical discourse analysis: A multimodal introduction. SAGE Publications. Hadjeris, F. (2024). Deconstructing gender stereotypes in standardized English language school textbooks in Algeria: Implications for equitable instructional materials. Discourse Studies, 26(5), 621–642. https://lnkd.in/gfsTgUsK - Hashtags: #ELT #ELTpublishing #MaterialsDevelopment #ContentEditing #CriticalDiscourseAnalysis #MCDA #GenderRepresentation #InclusiveEducation #AppliedLinguistics #TextbookDesign #DEI #ELTchat