1 English as a Foreign Language, Elementary School

In Sweden, English is a language with high status, and digitization in particular has made English easily available so that many children learn English outside of school, what is called ‘extramural English’ (Sundqvist and Sylvén 2016), through commercials, music, and different digital media, including online games, YouTube clips, etc. Furthermore, Sweden has a long tradition of subtitling films rather than dubbing, apart from animated cartoons for the youngest, which are often released in two versions, one dubbed and one subtitled. Thus, Swedish children even in early grades could be expected to have learned English through various out-of-school literacy practices (cf. Street 2003).

In the Swedish school system, English is a compulsory subject from grade 3, elementary school (children aged around 9) though schools can choose to introduce English at any time during preschool class or in elementary school up to grade 3.

In the following, we analyze a textbook in English for Swedish elementary school, grade 4 (students around 10 years of age). The same textbook has been analyzed in an unpublished work by Maria Nilsson (2015), who concludes that this text—like many other textbooks in English—to a great extent consists of “atypical” genres in a kind of “school English”. Some of the findings from that analysis are used here as well.

In our analysis we will look closely at two spreads from the textbook Happy! Textbook Year 4 (Sutcliffe et al. 2009).Footnote 1

1.1 General Structure and Setting

At the start of the book, the reader is presented to the Best family, living in Manchester, England. In the first chapter of the book, the readers learn some basic facts about Adam and Kate Best who are brother and sister: their favorite sport, food, and color, etc.

The book is structured in a number of chapters dealing with different content with the aim of letting students practice various aspects of the English language, such as grammatical constructions or word knowledge. The texts presented in the book spreads shown in Figs. 9.1 and 9.2 are supposed to give the students opportunities to practice constructions like “are/is wearing” and plural forms of regular nouns (Fancy Dress Day, Fig. 9.1). The reader is not provided with information about what structures or content areas the student is supposed to practice in the respective section. Instead this is implicit. Most book spreads have the same overall structure, with a heading given in a red text box, and with writing combined with—usually drawn—illustrations. Each spread provides the reader with a glossary with Swedish translations of a number of words, given in text boxes separated by dotted lines. For each section, there is an equivalent section in an exercise book.

Fig. 9.1
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Fancy Dress Day, Happy Grade 4 (Sutcliffe et al. 2009, pp. 34–35, with permission from Gleerups)

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Fig. 9.2
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The colors of the Rainbow, Happy Grade 4 (Sutcliffe et al. 2009, pp. 26–27, with permission from Gleerups)

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What is particularly striking in this textbook is the ample use of dialogues, regardless of content. The text in Fig. 9.1 is an example of this. This is a kind of dialogue that would hardly be heard in natural conversation; instead it gives some kind of description of the illustration filling the top of the book spread. Thus, instead of achieving the goals regarding dialogues indicated in the curriculum documents, the use of dialogues seems to be a way of structuring read-aloud activities in the classroom, where students can be asked to read different parts of the text (in this case Kate and Adam). This is a recurrent pattern right from the start of the book, where Adam and Kate have a dialogue presenting themselves (presumably to the intended reader).

1.2 Interaction Between Text Resources

As was mentioned above, each section provides the reader with a glossary. The words in the text boxes are presented in the same order as they appear in the text, which makes the words relatively easy to find. The illustrations given in each section are clearly connected to the writing on the same page, and they can therefore support a reader who is unfamiliar with the content of the text. However, the illustration of the rainbow shown in Fig. 9.2 can hardly support a reader who is unfamiliar with the physics of light. In writing, information is given about the ways in which different colors bend. Here the rainbow with a pot of gold gives no support for the reader who wants to know more about this phenomenon. This book spread is one of few examples with a content that is clearly connected to other subject areas—in this case science. Thus, here the students have an opportunity to actually learn more about light spectra at the same time as they practice their English in the area of science. Yet it is obvious that such a benefit is not the intention of the author, not least since it presents the golden pot at the bottom of the rainbow as it is in fact for real.

1.3 Figurative Language

There is no figurative language in the sections we use as examples of this textbook, apart from Adam’s comments that the jugglers look like parrots and Kate’s comment implying that Adam is “a clown”. Given the difficulties language learners can have with figurative language, the lack of such expressions is more or less expected in a basic language textbook like this.

1.4 Values

The textbook as a whole reveals a number of implicit values. Examples are the traditional roles that boys and girls are given in the illustration in the text about the Fancy Dress Day. The illustration takes up the description of the only girl in the text as having dancing lessons and wearing a pink skirt and silver tights. In the illustration she poses in ballet fashion. In writing she is also said to be an acrobat, but that is not shown in the illustration. The boys, on the other hand, form a band and in the illustration they are remarkably active in their playing.

In other parts of the book, English people and their habits are described in quite stereotypical ways. In one section it is said that “In England many people have a full English breakfast”, and that “Many people have a special Sunday lunch of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding”, etc.

Less traditional is the description of the elderly in an overall section called “Friends”. Here a band is presented, consisting of residents in a retirement home. They all seem to be quite healthy and active, for instance forming a band and being interested in motorbikes and the like.

2 English, Secondary School

Our second example regarding languages is taken from the Singaporean textbook All About English (Doyle et al. 2011). Thus, this example does not concern foreign language learning, although in Singapore, English is one of four official languages (the others are Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay). Therefore, Singaporean students—as well as students from other linguistic backgrounds—can be expected to not to have English as their mothertongue or strongest language. The textbook has four main sections: Listening and viewing, Reading and viewing, Speaking and representing, and Writing and representing, thus giving attention to meaning-making from reading and creating texts, both paper-based and digital, including films, etc. Each section consists of a number of chapters. In the following, we will have a closer look at one chapter in the section on Speaking and representing: “Improving pronunciation”. Figure 9.3 shows the first two pages of the chapter. In the following, we concentrate mainly on the general structure and values. However, since multimodality is the focus of our book, it is of interest to take a brief look at how multimodality as a theme connected to work with text is handled in this textbook. The textbook—just like the Singaporean textbook in science that was used as an example to present our model in Sect. 4.5—is in itself complex regarding the use of different visual representations (see Figs. 9.3 and 9.4). The layout is largely built on a variety of visual resources, such as photographs, text boxes, tables, and color, and recurring symbols indicate connections with, for instance, preceding chapters or textbooks or aspects of the content that the students are supposed to pay special attention to. But how is multimodality as a phenomenon treated in the text? First, the chapters dealing with speaking and writing are denoted “Speaking and representing” and “Writing and representing” (our italics) respectively, implying a possible multimodal focus on communication. However, a closer look at these chapters reveal a limited focus on other resources than speech or writing. Some comments are given on layout and the use of images in the chapter on writing, though mainly in a very general sense, for instance that photographs can be included in a travel report. In a section on how to write informative brochures some comments on layout are given, though commonly quite vaguely, like “Choose a layout and organization that is suitable for the information you are giving and that will help to achieve your purpose”. However, little is said about how to do that. Now let us take a closer look at one chapter in the section Speaking and Representing, namely Improving Pronunciation (Figs. 9.3 and 9.4).

Fig. 9.3
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copyright reasons)

Improving pronunciation, All About English, secondary school (Koh et al. 2011, pp. 104–105, Reproduced by permission of Hodder Education, photographs blurred for

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Fig. 9.4
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Improving pronunciation, All About English, secondary school (Koh et al. 2011, pp. 106–107, Reproduced by permission of Hodder Education)

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2.1 General Structure

We can note that the chapter starts off by giving an everyday example of what is viewed as a common mispronunciation in the vernacular Singaporean variety of English: a boy, Ravi, pronounces “theme” as “team” which results in a misunderstanding. The reader is told that you need to have “good pronunciation” to avoid similar situations. Then the reader is given an introduction to pronunciation together with more arguments for the importance of correct pronunciation. The rest of the chapter has a thematic structure, first dealing with consonant clusters and then vowel sounds, including diphthongs. In these sections the reader is given overviews of the English sounds, combined with instructions about how to pronounce the sounds correctly, with examples of common mispronunciations to avoid. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is used, and symbols indicate that audio files are available through digital resources (in this case, a compact disc).

The text includes a variety of textual resources. Apart from printed words in headings, text-box-like sections labeled “Connection”, and running text, the first introductory book spread contains a comic strip with school children and photographs of professionals working in areas where good pronunciation is important. In the succeeding pages, tables are commonly used to present English words with similar spelling or pronunciation in systematic ways, presumably based on sounds where the pronunciation in vernacular Singaporean English differs from Standard English. Throughout the book, symbolic images like a shackle (p. 105) for connections to another book in the same series or an image of a dictionary for definitions (p. 106).

Just as in the example from the Singaporean science textbook that we used to introduce our analytical model, the starting point of the chapter is an everyday problem followed by a movement towards systematic descriptions similar to the ones used in the discipline, in this case linguistics. In both of these textbooks, the movement towards the discipline concerns both content and text resources used: the comic strip and photos of people using spoken language on the first two pages, followed by tables containing subject-specific symbols from the IPA, with terminology such as ‘syllables’, ‘consonant clusters’, ‘suffix, and ‘phonemes’ in the running text. These terms are all explained in the text.

2.2 Interaction Between Text Resources

Regarding the interaction between different text resources used, this chapter involves no apparent challenges. Images are placed close to the running text they refer to, for instance the two professionals who are placed to the right of the column about which professions involving a lot of verbal communication, even though it might not be completely clear what professional role the male sitting on a stool has. The tables with subject-specific symbols are integrated in the running text, with explicit connectors such as “the following tables show…”.

2.3 Values

The theme chosen for this chapter clearly reveals underlying values concerning “right and wrong”. A main point is that there is “good” and “bad” pronunciation, and that the Singaporean variety of English is not “good pronunciation”. As mentioned, the starting point is a made-up problem, with a misunderstanding caused by a /th/ pronounced as /t/ in line with vernacular Singaporean pronunciation rules. The reader is told that you need “good pronunciation” for two reasons. First to avoid misunderstandings. Second to make sure that the listener “pays attention” to what is said. The second reason is clearly value-laden, implying that vernacular pronunciation—fully legitimate within the Singaporean community—would reveal you to be less cultivated, and that you would therefore be less inclined to be taken seriously by people who “count”. Thus, this statement implicitly contains values about good and bad language. The next two pages, though, are explicit about what the student should and should not do as regards pronunciation, and here, all examples given are “mispronounced words” in Singaporean English. Such a normative perspective can be contrasted to the ways dialects and sociolects are treated as functional varieties of a language in much of modern sociolinguistics (e.g. Wardaugh 2006).