Exploring the Representation of Environmental Issues in an EFL Textbook for Secondary School: A Multimodal Analysis

Abstract

This study intends to explore how environmental issues are represented in an EFL textbook for secondary school. The study obtained the data from the English for Nusantara book for 8th grade. By administering a qualitative textual analysis with a multimodal approach, the study analyzed verbal and visual complementarity of three worksheets. It utilized Ideational-intersemiotic Complementarity (Royce, 1998). The findings show that the verbal and visual texts represent flood-related environmental issue. There are three main points of flood-related environmental issues – the causes, the effects, and the solutions. Verbal and visual texts of the selected worksheets are completed each other. Hence, encouraging students’ comprehension of the module, especially related to environmental issues, could be expanded by identifying both texts as a single whole.