Gender Positioning in Education: A Critical Image Analysis of ESL Texts

This article is adapted from a project report prepared for the author's MA in Education, the objective being to report the use of an adapted analytical technique for examining the images contained in contemporary ESL textbooks. The point of departure for the study was the identification of the trend in mass-market ESL materials from textual to visual communication, a trend discussed in the text. Together with this semantic shift, a political-economic agenda has been identified in the existence of organizations such as the British Council; the objective of the analysis was to discover whether the increasingly predominant images used in ESL texts convey a particular vision of and/or positioning of gender reality as part ofa wider-reaching agenda. The article provides background to the evolution of critical image analysis, followed by a rationale for the project based on the current realities of the global ESL market. There follows an outline of the data selected for analysis and the results of the image interrogation. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the ramifications of the study and the potential for further research work