Diversities in an English language textbook: visual representations and/in intersectionality

• Autor(a) principal: Milani, Victor Gomes
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista Horizontes de Linguística Aplicada
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.unb.br/index.php/horizontesla/article/view/41515
• topic: Livro Didático de Inglês; Linguagem Visual; Interseccionalidade; English Textbook; Visual Language; Intersectionality

Based on an Applied Linguistics (AL) perspective of the 21st century (MOITA LOPES, 2006), The following article presents an initial analysis of people’s representations portrayed by visual language under a sossiosemiotic (KRESS; VAN LEEUWEN, 2006; NASCIMENTO; BEZERRA; HEBERLE, 2011) and intersectional (CRENSHAW, 2002; LIBARDI; JACKS, 2020) perspective in an English language textbook. The corpus is composed by 27 image resources, which are distributed in 12 unit-opening pages. The textbook selected, Way to English for Brazilian Learners (Ática Publishing House, 2020, 3rd edition) is part of the school subject called Modern Foreign Language – English and is addressed to the sixth grade of elementary school. The following analytical procedures were adopted: identification of the number of image resources containing people in the opening pages of the units; b) counting, tabulation and description of image resources focusing on the representation of people through the representative meanings of the Grammar of Visual Design (GVD) (KRESS; VAN LEEUWEN, 2006; NASCIMENTO; BEZERRA; HEBERLE, 2011) and intersectionality (CRENSHAW, 2002; LIBARDI; JACKS, 2020); and c) interpretation of data considering a possible pedagogical context for textbooks, Applied Linguistics (AL) and some points of Sociology of Education (SE). Images analyzed pointed towards a relatively positive perspective in relation to the (co)existence of human diversities in terms of the masculine and feminine genders and white/non-white/oriental races/ethnicities, with some exceptions concerning transgender/non-binary and disabled people.