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The aim of this study is to portray and explore the variety of social actors depicted visually along the pages of the intermediate level ELT coursebooks that are published locally (by British and American publishers) and marketed globally (mostly to the EFL contexts). For this, a thorough photo-ethnographic exploration of the visuals supported by the inventory of “social actor interaction network” is employed. In the field of Coursebook Analysis, visuals have attracted limited attention despite marking asocio-semiotically rich discursive field. In fact, the semiotic labor division between the “word” and the “image” in representing and reconstructing (simulating) the world, points to a gain on the part of the image as the brain is evolutionarily more experienced in processing visual information than processing verbal information. Therefore, images can appeal more directly to the sensory experience domains of the viewers via visual contact, evoking deeper consciousness. Acting as the prominent mediators of signification practice, visuals catalogue the representations and simulations of social-life viewed from a particular subject position associated with a particular set of norms, beliefs, and values. Hence, they position the viewers across dynamic loci of subjectivities in terms of social distance, relations, and interaction. As both reflections and reproductions of reality, images in the coursebooks have the potent to influence learners’ perspectives of the world presenting them with readymade cognitive schemes. In order to reveal a comprehensive picture of the visually depicted social actors and the identity options made available through them, in this study the author focused on the peopled photos of the 6 popularly traded ELT coursebooks. The author investigated them regarding the relations of social distance, involvement, power and interaction formed between the depicted social actors and their viewers as well as the emergent practices of exclusion, role allocation, genericization, specification, assimilation, individualization, and categorization. The results show that the representational repertoires of the coursebooks contain disproportionately distributed visual depictions of social actors in terms of cultural orientation and gender. The “culturally different” are repeatedly pictured in assimilative ways as an aggregate of enumerable people, while the social actors of the reference group are usually pictured individually and with their own intended meaning.

Who Populates the Visual Landscape of the ELT Coursebooks?: A Photo Analytical Exploration