MULTIMODALITY IN ELT TEXTBOOKS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN LOCALLY AND INTERNATIONALLY PUBLISHED EFL TEXTBOOKS IN INDONESIA

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the verbal and visual modes found in the locally and internationally published EFL textbooks. The study applied the theory of multimodal, a combination of Halliday‘s (1994) Systemic Functional Linguistic and Kress and van Leeuwen‘s (2006) Grammar Visual Design to identify the verbal and visual modes. This study also used a qualitative research method proposed by Miles, Huberman, & Saldana (2014). The data used from 11 chapters in the locally published EFL textbook entitled 'English, Think Globally Act Locally' published by the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture in 2018 and from 18 chapters in the internationally published EFL textbook entitled 'Cambridge Global English for Cambridge Secondary 1 English as a Second Language Stage 9' published by Cambridge University Press in 2016 related to multimodality verbal and visual modes in the form of images containing text from each chapter in both books. The results of the study found that the verbal and visual modes contained in EFL textbooks published locally and internationally had similarities and differences. It was also found that EFL textbooks published internationally were more dominant in applying verbal and visual modes. Therefore, internationally published EFL textbooks are recommended to be used as EFL textbooks for 9th-grade junior high school students in Indonesia because it contained more multimodalities that can contribute to students' cognitive abilities and increase creativity, attention, engagement generation, and literacy changes in students (Torres, 2015).