Interpersonal encounters in Tunisian EFL textbooks: An SFL and multimodal approach

Dorra Moalla, Fatma Benelhadj, & Nadia Abid

Abstract

With the intercultural turn in the 1990s, EFL textbooks became sites for culture and identity expression: they need to equally represent the cultures and the participants in question (cf. Byram 2021; Guilherme 2002; Kramsch 1993; Risager 1991, 2014). This paper studies how participants from different cultures are portrayed when brought together in ‘encounters’ through conversations, dialogue balloons and visuals in the 7th and 8th form EFL textbooks in Tunisia. Nine conversations, one dialogue balloon and 233 pictures were extracted from the textbooks and analysed borrowing the tools of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), namely the mood system, and the Grammar of Visual Design (GVD). The analysis has revealed that although the textbook designers managed to represent the participants (Tunisian versus Non-Tunisian) and the cultures equally at the quantitative level, they failed to do so qualitatively. In fact, the conversations and the visuals are rather simplistic, and depict the Tunisian characters as inferior, less knowledgeable and less articulate compared to the Non-Tunisians. There is also a lack of complementarity between the verbal conversations and the visuals. As implications of this piece of research, the study calls for a more careful selection of authentic materials for textbooks to promote Tunisian students’ intercultural communicative competences.