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Visual Communication
http://vcj.sagepub.com/content/8/3/247
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DOI: 10.1177/1470357209106467
2009 8: 247 Visual Communication
Jeff Bezemer and Gunther Kress
Visualizing English: a social semiotic history of a school subject

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JEFF BEZEMER
and GUNTHER KRESS
School of Culture Language & Communica-
tion, Institute of Education, University of
London, UK
ABStrAct
In this article, the authors provide an empiri-
cally based, social semiotic account of
changes in textbook design between 1930 and
the present day. They look at the multimodal
design of textbooks rather than at image or
any other mode in isolation. Their review of 23
textbooks for secondary education in English
shows that profound changes have taken place
not just in the use of image but equally in
writing, typography and layout. Design is no
longer exclusively organized by the principles
of the organization of writing, but also, and in-
creasingly so, by graphic, visual principles.
They explore what these semiotic changes
mean for the social organization of design and
knowledge production, asking: What is Eng-
lish, a subject that supposedly concerns itself
with the modes of writing and speech? What
has changed in the environment that is set up
by the textbook makers for teachers and stu-
dents to engage in?
KeY WOrDS
graphic design multimodality pedagogy
subject English textbooks
INTRODUCTION
Many of us have the impression that textbooks, like so many
other media of dissemination, have become increasingly vi-
sual. Indeed, when browsing through a contemporary and a
pre-Second World War textbook, it seems clear that there are
many more images now than before. To the pessimists, the in-
creasing use of image is a threat to literacy skills and must in-
evitably lead to the dumbing down of culture and, further, is
bound to have deleterious effects on economic performance.
Less prominent, if equally rmly expressed, are beliefs in the
empowering potential of such changes (Kaplan, 1995). In this
article, we argue against both these arguments and instead
provide an empirically based, social semiotic account of the
changes in textbook design. We argue, rst, that one needs to
look at the multimodal design of textbooks rather than at
image or any other mode in isolation. There may be more im-
ages, but has anything changed in the writing? Or in the rela-
tion between image and writing? And how about typography?
Or layout? And what about textbooks for different audiences,
or textbooks for different subjects: Have they all equally be-
come more visual? When one begins to investigate these issues
more systematically, one also needs to nd a way to measure
any increase in the visual; or conclude that counting images is
a rather problematic exercise. Second, we argue that one
needs to attend to the relations between social and semiotic
change. If there are, indeed, more images, then what does that
mean, other than that we now live in a visual culture? Our con-
cern being education, we are keen to nd out if anything has
changed in what a subject entails; what, for instance, is Eng-
Article
Visualizing English:
a social semiotic history of a school subject
SAGE Publications (Los Angeles,
London, New Delhi, Singapore and
Washington DC):
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Vol 8(3): 247262
DOI 10.1177/1470357209106467
by Debora Amadio on September 7, 2010 vcj.sagepub.com Downloaded from
lish, a subject that supposedly concerns itself with the modes
of writing and speech? What are the social relations between
textbook makers, teachers and learners? Who does what semi-
otic work for whom? Looking at changes in representation in
this way, one can begin to understand the visual turn in text-
books and other media more fully.
METHOD
Our account is based on a review of secondary school text-
books for subject English from the 1930s (8 textbooks, 11 ex-
cerpts, 115 pages), 1980s (9 textbooks, 10 excerpts, 72 pages)
and 2000s (6 textbooks, 6 excerpts, 53 pages). The textbooks
were written for students aged 1116 in education in England.
They were randomly chosen from card and electronic cata-
logues of the library of the Institute of Education, University
of London, which has the largest collection of textbooks in
England. The selected excerpts deal with English literature.
We looked at four modes of representation image, writing,
typography and layout and at the modal relations between
image and writing. By mode we mean a socially and culturally
shaped resource for making meaning. Modes can be used to
represent what the world is like, how people are socially re-
lated and how semiotic entities are connected (Kress, 2009). By
text we mean the material form in which rhetorical purposes
and the processes of design are given realization through the
modes and modal resources available to the designer. We use
the term designer metonymically to refer to all those in-
volved in the production of the textbook. A detailed discussion
of the theoretical framework we use here can be found in
Bezemer and Kress (2008).
Where it seemed appropriate and feasible, we counted the
frequency of occurrences of certain modal realizations in texts
across the three eras, in order to establish whether the use of a
mode has changed diachronically or whether we are dealing
with synchronic variation. As we are interested in the visuali-
zation of English as a school subject, we began our analysis by
looking at the images that feature in textbooks. We drew a dis-
tinction between photography and drawing and attended to
the provenance of the images. We did not analyse the use of
resources such as contextualization, pictorial detail, illumi-
nation, or depth (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006), although we
did attend to changes over time in the use of colour. We also at-
tended to the status relations between image on the one hand
and instructional and literary writing on the other, loosely
drawing on Barthes (1977[1964]) and Martinec and Salway
(2005). We explored how writing is used to introduce an ex-
cerpt from a literary work, and how typography is used to rep-
resent an excerpt from a literary work. We attended to mood,
clause relations and genre, drawing on Halliday (1985), Kress
250 ViSuAl cOmmunicAtiOn 8 (3)
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and Hodge (1979), Hodge and Kress (1988) and Fairclough
(2003). As for typography, we compared the type in which in-
structional and literary writing were set. Here we loosely drew
on Stckls (2005) toolkit for analysing type and related re-
sources such as line spacing, orientation, indentation and typo-
graphic emphasis. Lastly, we focused on the layout of pages. We
attended to the page format and grid, including number of
columns per page, column width and orientation, and align-
ment of page elements (Ambrose and Harris, 2005; Haslam,
2006).
IMAGE
Images are difcult to count since they are not made up of dis-
crete entities such as words. Hence, it is often far from obvious
whether a representation in a textbook counts as one image or
as two images. Quantifying the use of modes becomes even
more complex if one mode starts acting like another, for in-
stance when writing is placed in a box. In spite of these issues,
we attempted to count the number of images in all our text-
book excerpts. The outcomes are perhaps unsurprising: the
number of images in textbooks for English have increased sig-
nicantly, from an average of virtually no images at all (003
images per page) in the 1930s, to 2 in every 4 pages (054 im-
ages per page) in the 1980s, to 3 in every 4 pages (074 images
per page) in the 2000s. Compared to subjects like Science and
Mathematics, this number is still rather low, but it is by far the
biggest increase for those three subjects: between 1930 and
now, images in Science went up from 064 to 337 images per
page, and in Maths they went up from 295 to 871.
Usually, images in the English textbook sections we looked
at are connected to the written parts of the text in that the
image signies an aspect of a literary work. For instance, a
song from Shakespeares The Tempest, dealing with a drunken
man is placed next to an image depicting a Falstafan charac-
ter (Hackman et al., 2001; reprinted here as Figure 1).
The image and the poem are related not just by their shared
reference to a drunken man, but also by their tone by
which we mean a complex of features which aim to place a
representation in a social and affective domain. Sometimes an
image is related not to one poem but to a selection of poems
which in turn relate to one another. For instance, in Banks
(1986) a unit is called Falling in and out of love, containing
excerpts from diaries, poems and plays and a still from the lm
Blue Lagoon, depicting a couple embracing. Images in English
textbooks not only relate to poems, but also to poets. For in-
stance, we found a reproduction of a painting depicting John
Milton in Mamour (1934; reprinted here as Figure 2), a repro-
duction of a drawing of William Blake in Hackman et al., 2001)
and a photograph of Jackie Kay in Baker et al. (2003). In the
251 Bezemer & KreSS: ViSuAlizing engliSh
Figure 1 A drunken man
(Hackman et al., 2001: 64). Repro-
duced by permission of Hodder &
Stoughton Ltd.
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1980s, and more so in the 2000s, we also found relations with
written introductions or instructions. For instance, in Reynolds
and Norman (2002), a discussion of what makes poetry spe-
cial is accompanied by a drawing depicting a chemist watch-
ing an ongoing experiment and a blackboard with experiment
making a poem on it.
We might call these relations between writing and image
unequal, and treat the image as subordinate to the writing,
since we would still be left with a cohesive text (Halliday and
Hasan, 1976) if the images were omitted, whereas the poetry
sections of the book would no longer make sense if they con-
tained the images but not the poems. That is not so much be-
cause literature (i.e. writing) is the essence of English
although it may well be or because the mode of image does
not have the potential to make up a cohesive, self-contained
text, but because the set of images that we would be left with
here would not seem to make up a semiotic entity. While we
did not nd any imagewriting relations where the writing was
subordinate to the image, we did nd examples where image
and writing were on an equal footing. Sometimes the readers
attention is drawn to an image that they are expected to re -
ect upon. For instance, in Comiskey (1988) an analogy is
drawn between interpreting poems and photographs, asking
the learner to write in a sentence what you see in each of the
photographs on the following page (p.77). Neither the images
nor the writing can be left out here without the text becoming
incohesive. This imagewriting relation seems an example of
relay: here text ... and image stand in a complementary rela-
tionship; the words, in the same way as the images, are frag-
ments of a more general syntagm (Barthes, 1977[1964]: 41).
The relations between image and writing have remained
constant over time in English: throughout the 20th century,
most of the images have been subordinate to writing, some
have been on an equal footing with writing, and none have
been superordinate to writing. This does not mean that the
252 ViSuAl cOmmunicAtiOn 8 (3)
Figure 2 Excerpt from Mamour
(1934: 89);written text introducing
John Miltons LAllegro.
The Elizabethan age was suc-
ceeded by a period of reli-
gious and political strife,
which culminated in the tri-
umph of Puritanism under
Oliver Cromwell. Therefore
the expansive development of
literature was restricted, and
thought mainly concentrated
on one particular book the
Bible. The dominating gure
of this age is John Milton, the
great Puritan poet ; but he is
so supremely an artist that he
blends the perfection of an-
cient art, as learnt from the
Renaissance, with the reli-
gious turmoil of his time,
which has so profound an ef-
fect on his work. His most fa-
mous poem is the epic
Paradise Lost, which relates
the story of mans rst dis-
obedience and its fruit. He
also wrote many shorter
poems, of which the following
is an example.
by Debora Amadio on September 7, 2010 vcj.sagepub.com Downloaded from
images do not add meaning to the text on the contrary. They
make visible those aspects of a world to which the writing
refers but which the writing does not necessarily detail. For in-
stance, the song by Shakespeare in Figure 1 constructs a
drunken man, but it does not reveal what clothes he is wear-
ing. That is how image exemplies the poem (Martinec and
Salway, 2005). Images also frame poetry or prose pedagogi-
cally. Adding images to a text which was originally produced as
a written text (i.e. the poem) is a way of recontextualizing the
poem, that is, reconguring social relations between authors
and readers. These social relations can be suggested by the
provenance of the image. Compare Figure 1 with Figure 2.
The image of the Falstafan character in the former draws on
a popular genre with a relatively short history. In the latter, a
poem by John Milton, LAllegro, is accompanied by a photo of
The blind Milton dictating Paradise Lost to his daughters,
an oil painting by Mihly Munkcsy. The genre of this painting
has a relatively long history (it was painted in 1877); and it is
probably fair to say that it has a much higher status than the
other image, at least among an elite (it is on permanent dis-
play in the New York Public Library).
Using these images, the designer of the text in Figure 1 man-
ages to downplay the status/exclusivity of the poem and its au-
thor while the designer of the text in Figure 2 seems to be
doing the opposite: the (cultural) signicance of one canonical
text is reinforced by placing it next to another canonical text.
This use of image is aligned with choices made in the written
introductions to the poem. In Figure 2, the poet is fore-
grounded by using active constructions suggesting his mas-
tery, as in He blends the perfection of ancient art ... with the
religious turmoil of his time. In Figure 1 it is merely observed
that William Shakespeare included songs in many of his
plays. Hackman et al. (2001) could have made different
choices of images, bringing in, for example, William Hogarths
illustration of The Tempest. Indeed the same section of the text-
book features some of William Blakes illustrations of his own
poems. But they are exceptions: drawing on the acknowledge-
ments sections of the textbooks and, to our admittedly lim-
ited knowledge, none of the other images in the 1980s or
2000s excerpts represent well-known pieces of art. In other
words, over time, image has both continued to serve to expand
and frame literary works, while its use has increased. In other
words, (re)contextualization has changed. We will come back to
this in the discussion.
So far we have discussed image as mode, but photography
and drawing can be treated as separate modes since they de-
veloped out of different materials and social practices, and be-
cause they seem to function quite distinctively in textbooks.
In textbooks for English, drawings are usually commissioned
253 Bezemer & KreSS: ViSuAlizing engliSh
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artwork, produced by illustrators. Photographs are usually se-
lected by picture editors and picture researchers, drawing on
existing picture libraries such as Barnabys, Mary Evans, Hul-
ton and Mansell. In other words, most drawings originated in
the context of the textbooks design and for its audience, while
most photographs were made in different contexts, often by
anonymous photographers, vis--vis unknown audiences. Some
photographs represent other artwork, such as a painting (e.g.
by Munkcsy in Mamour, 1934), or a lm (e.g. Blue Lagoon in
Banks, 1986). In those cases, we are inclined to treat the photo-
graphs as reproductions rather than as instantiations of the
mode of photography.
Between 1980 and now, a shift has taken place in the distri-
bution of drawings and photographs. In the materials from the
1930s, we counted three photographs and no drawings. In the
1980s, we encountered 24 photographs, none of which were re-
productions, and 15 drawings. In the 2000s, we saw 5 photo-
graphs and 34 drawings. All images in the 1930s and 1980s are
in black and white except three in which one colour is used. In
the 2000s, all images are in full colour. The photographs and
drawings are crucially different in terms of the sense of the
real they invoke. Most photos show snapshots of real people
and real objects, in black and white. Most drawings show an
imagined world, with imagined people, animals, objects, in
full colour. The drawings are usually friendly and funny (Fig-
ure 1), while the photos are confronting (Figure 3). The draw-
ings appear to be entertaining, while the photos are to raise
critical awareness. Perhaps the peak in the number of photo-
graphs in the 1980s points to a shift from a focus in English on
real life in the 1980s to imagined life in the 2000s, the for-
mer articulated using the affordances of photography and the
latter articulated using the affordances of drawing.
254 ViSuAl cOmmunicAtiOn 8 (3)
Figure 3 Excerpt from Brindle et al.
(2002: 1001); written text introduc-
ing Denise Livertovs What were they
like?
The Vietnam War was one of
the most important military
conicts of the Twentieth
Century. As well as lms such
as Platoon, many poems and
prose works were written
about it and the people in-
volved.
Some details:
The war lasted from 1959 to
1975.
Communist North Vietnam
was ghting South Vietnam.
Fearing the growth of Com-
munism, the US supported
the South for the last ten
years.
543,000 American troops
were there at the height of
the conict.
The war involved ferocious
jungle ghting, intense air
strikes and civilian casual-
ties.
34 million Vietnamese died.
58,000 Americans died, and
anti-war protests at home
eventually contributed to the
American withdrawal and de-
feat.
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WRITING
In the 1930s, most textbooks were used alongside anthologies,
which had the texts of poems with no written commentary. In
other words, writing served to present the poem, nothing
else. By the 1980s, it had become common for written texts
added by the textbook authors to appear alongside poems in
one and the same book. Most of the writing commenting on lit-
erature in the textbooks from the 1980s consists of questions
with a few commands and statements (Figure 4). This func-
tional distribution reveals the pedagogic functions of writing:
questions used to elicit information, commands used for peda-
gogic instruction and statements used to provide information.
That allows us to point to changes in pedagogy via changed
proportions of questions, commands and statements. In the
2000s, many more statements are used, also appearing before
the poem, and a similar number of questions after the poem.
Statements introduce the poem, the poet, literary concepts
and the everyday world. Commands instruct learners to act
to read the poem, answer questions, write their own poem, etc.
Questions, in this context, check on performance as compre-
hension. As with the changes in the use of image, this shows
that poems are increasingly pedagogized and curricularized;
that is, recontextualized, adding layers of meaning to the
poem, and these meanings are presented to learners before
they have engaged with the poem. This sequential inner or-
ganization of the text is meaningful at another level: it is now
assumed that a certain sense of, for example, the historical
context of the poem is required to understand it the poem is
not an aesthetic entity by itself; it also suggests that for this
audience that information needs to be supplied it cannot be
assumed; and that it is the responsibility of the textbook au-
thors to provide that context. Above all, it suggests that the
poem has become a pedagogic object. The ordering which was
dominant before the 1980s, by contrast, suggested that the
learners engagement should not be pre-empted by anything
existing outside the poem, and that it was not the responsibil-
ity of the textbook to provide such information but to ask ques-
tions which help learners to construct their own
interpretations. The poem was treated as an aesthetic entity in
its own right, and was intended to be approached as such.
Not only has writing changed in terms of the proportion of
questions, commands and statements, but sentence structure
has changed as well (Figures 2 and 3). Both Figures 2 and 3
consist of statements only: they sketch the socio-historical con-
text of a poem. In both cases, the block of writing appears be-
fore the poem.
Table 1 (overleaf) presents a clause analysis of the two ex-
cerpts. Writing in Mamour (1934) has many more clauses per
sentence than that of Brindle et al. (2002). As a result, Mamour
255 Bezemer & KreSS: ViSuAlizing engliSh
Figure 4 Example from Heath
(1986: 119).
by Debora Amadio on September 7, 2010 vcj.sagepub.com Downloaded from
establishes more relations among clauses in sentences, and
these cover a wider range of types of relations. All three of
these factors could be interpreted as indications of a loss in
complexity. If syntactic complexity is equated with cognitive
complexity, the conclusion would be that contemporary text-
books are cognitively less demanding. Instead, we argue that
the question ought to be: Who does what semiotic work for
whom?
In the 1930s text, the ordering of propositions, articulated in
writing as a means of producing coherent text as knowledge,
was taken to be the task of the author. In the contemporary
text, much of the work of producing textual coherence and,
therefore, knowledge is left to the users of the textbook, that
is, teachers and students. This shift in agency is related to a
move towards new allocations of social and semiotic agency
and forms of (collaborative) authorship, and linked to a concur-
rent move away from traditional notions of knowledge.
TYPOGRAPHY
Our review suggests that until the late 1980s one font is used
consistently throughout. Of the eight texts we looked at from
the 1980s, ve used a serif face (e.g. Times), two used sans serif
(e.g. Arial) or slab, squared serif (Rockwell) and one, pub-
lished in 1988, used both. From then on, textbooks use differ-
ent fonts. All six texts from the 2000s use different fonts for
different parts of the text, such as the introduction to a poem,
the poem itself, instructions about what to do with the poem
and annotations of the poem. In ve cases, the poem is set in
serif while the other parts are set in sans serif or handwritten
font. In only one case is this the other way around. What this
pattern seems to suggest is that, from the late 1980s, type face
has begun to serve to separate out different curricular and
pedagogic entities on the page. As well as that, designers use
the meaning potential of type face to suggest what these
256 ViSuAl cOmmunicAtiOn 8 (3)
Sentence structure
Semantic relations of clauses
in sentences
Mamour (1934)
Mainly complex sentences
(13 clauses in 5 sentences)
Causal (therefore),
Additive (and),
Contrastive (but),
Elaboration (which)
Grammatical relations of
clauses in sentences
Mainly hypotaxis (non-restric
tive relative clauses intro-
duced by which)
Brindle, Machin and Thomas
(2002)
Mainly simple sentences
(13 clauses in 10 sentences)
Causal (adverbial phrase of
cause),
Additive (and)
Mainly parataxis (and)
table 1 Clauses in Mamour (1934)
and in Brindle, et al (2002)
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different entities are about: the literary meaning of serif is
used to represent poems. Handwritten font may be used to rep-
resent annotations, suggesting they are notes, that is, provi-
sional, unpolished. Instructions or exercises may be set in sans
serif, suggesting they are transparent, straightforward and un-
ambiguous (Reynolds and Norman, 2002).
In most cases, type size is consistent throughout the text, ex-
cept for headings and titles of poems which may appear in
larger size. In two cases, a larger type was used for the poem
than for the rest of the text: in one case, that was the choice of
the experimental poet; in the other case, this was the choice
of the textbook designers (se Brindle et al., 2002). They used
type size alongside a range of other resources to make the
poem stand out from the rest of the text. Type was black
throughout the text in all cases except three. In two cases,
headings appeared in different colours. In another case, anno-
tations of a poem appeared in a different colour, with lower
contrast against its background (Baker et al., 2003); it also ap-
peared in smaller type, thus literally placing the annotations
in the background of the poem. Thus, in contrast to type face,
type size and colour usually do not play a signicant role in the
identication of different parts of a text. Nor have their uses
as resources changed over the last 70 years, again unlike the
use of type face.
Letter t, word spacing and line spacing are hardly ever
used as resources to differentiate between different parts of
the text. We found only one clear example of a text where the
word and line spacing was wider in the poem than in the rest
of the text (Figure 3), not just between verses but throughout
the poem. We also found some minor variations in alignment.
In our 1930s example (Figure 2), both the poem and the rest of
the text are justied. In most other cases, i.e. from 1980, writ-
ing is usually ranged left, in the poem as well as the other
parts of the text. There are three exceptions to this pattern, all
texts from the 1980s. In one text, the poem appears alongside
prose, the former being ranged left and the latter justied. In
two other cases, the poem is also ranged left while instructions
and introductions are justied. All writing in poems is horizon-
tally aligned. In Figure 3 (Brindle et al., 2002), however, we can
see that the presented poem is tilted.
While indentation is in decline, boxing and/or background
colouring is now a common feature of textbooks. Of the eight
texts from the 1980s that we looked at, only two use this re-
source. In one case, the poem appears in a line box which is
given a grey background. In another case, the poem appears in
a line box only. In contrast, ve out of the six texts from the
2000s that we looked at have poems and/or other parts of the
text appearing in a coloured or uncoloured box. This
boxing/colouring marks boundaries between different parts of
257 Bezemer & KreSS: ViSuAlizing engliSh
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the text much more sharply, suggesting that the parts operate
as separate semiotic entities. The typographic shift from in-
dentation to boxing/colouring points to a modal change: writ-
ten parts of the text are increasingly acting as graphic entities
that are connected not through cohesive devices in writing but
through the layout of the page.
Some of the poems we encountered were presented with
line numbers. Our collection of textbooks suggests that these
rst appear in 1986 and increasingly so in the following years.
Of the eight texts from the 1980s, three present poems with
line numbers, while in the 2000 texts, the proportion is four
out of six. Annotations rst appear in 2002, and only twice in
total. In all texts, parts (e.g. headings, titles, key words) are
highlighted using bold, italic, or underlined type, or using big-
ger or smaller type or, in two cases from the 2000s, type in
colour. However, in contrast to the poems represented in the
texts before 2000, some lexical items in poems are now in bold
type and glossed next to or below the poem. These changes to
the typographic presentation of the poem are again indicative
of changes in recontextualization, as some of the changes in
image and writing. In the 1930s, poems and their commentary
mostly appeared in separate books. In the 1980s, poems and
their commentary appeared alongside each other in the same
book. Now they appear not alongside but on top of each other:
poems and their commentary are now an inseparable, nearly
indistinguishable pedagogic entity.
LAYOUT
The textbooks we reviewed from the 1930s are A5 size or
smaller. In the only 1930s textbook that we found containing
images, the images appear on separate pages. All other pages
are designed following a rigid grid, with consistent margins,
baselines, headers and footers, allowing the writing to ow
continuously from one column to the next from top left to bot-
tom right. Writing is always arranged in single columns and
runs across pages. Textbooks from the 1980s are bigger: A4 size
or slightly smaller. Layouts still follow a relatively xed, writ-
ing-driven grid but allow for incorporation of images. The im-
ages are usually positioned in alignment with the grid. Writing
is now often arranged in two columns per page, although sin-
gle-column grids are also still common (ve and four cases, re-
spectively). Writing still runs across pages, though in some
cases page breaks always coincide with section breaks.
In the 2000s, book format has not changed, but we see a
move away from this rather rigid grid based on mathematically
coherent divisions of the page. While margins, baselines, head-
ers and footers are still consistent, the grid is less writing-dri-
ven, as is evident in the majority of the textbooks now using
varying numbers of columns per page and varying column
258 ViSuAl cOmmunicAtiOn 8 (3)
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widths, allowing writing to be wrapped around often
irregularly shaped images. There may still be writing running
across the page but more often page breaks coincide with sep-
arations between different parts of the text, marked off by line
boxes and background colours. The organization of the text,
however, remains largely linear, inviting the reader to read
from the top left corner to the bottom right corner of the page.
We found two rather extreme examples of this move away
from modernist page design. Already, in Seely (1985), we see
a page with a full-bleed picture (i.e. defying outer margins).
Three boxes lled with writing are overprinted on the picture
and placed in an angled orientation. However, this page design
is not typical of the textbook in which we found it. In Figure 3
(Brindle et al., 2002), we found a similar design being used
consistently throughout the book. The design is based on a two-
page spread, yet no writing or image runs into the gutter and
across the pages, suggesting there is still some sort of divide
between the two pages. The two pages are tessellated with full
colour graphic elements overprinted on a decorative back-
ground of butteries. The left-hand page contains ve separate
chunks of text. As discussed earlier, they are recognizable as
such through their typographic marking. Their proximity and
small overlaps suggest that they are somehow connected. The
distribution of modes suggests a division of some kind: two
chunks use image, three chunks use writing, potentially signi-
fying a division between them. This potential divide is reiter-
ated through the tilted placement of the images as opposed to
the straight positioning of the text blocks.
The layout thus suggests assemblage, the bringing together
of different materials and representations. Indeed, when read-
ing the chunks we engage in two different historical accounts.
The writing produces a general, factual, hence somewhat dis-
tanced account, whereas the images produce a spatially and
temporally more specic, personal account of these events.
While the distribution of modes may suggest a division, the
relative placement of the parts suggests that image and writ-
ing are not contrasting. The parts are placed in a cross, suggest-
ing integration, whereas a contrast could have been realized by
placing the images next to the written text blocks. Through
cross-placement, the subject History, and its concern with na-
tional histories, and the subject English, and its concern with
personal histories, are brought together. In the same way, the
black-and-white and full colour images may suggest some kind
of contrast, but the placement of these images does not. The
difference in colour reiterates the contrast suggested by the
ethnic differences of the people represented, while the place-
ment reiterates the similarity suggested by the despair of the
people represented. The people represented in the photo-
graphs are not enemies but part of the same ordeal. This
259 Bezemer & KreSS: ViSuAlizing engliSh
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example is not typical of the 2000s textbooks, but it shows a
design trend whose early signs are recognizable in all text-
books from the 2000s. It also puts the changes in writing into
perspective: the ordering of things is perhaps less articulated
in writing but all the more and differently so in layout.
DISCUSSION
Our review shows that English textbooks have indeed become
increasingly visual. Profound changes have taken place not
just in the use of image but equally in writing, typography and
layout. Design is no longer exclusively organized by the princi-
ples of the organization of writing, but also, and increasingly
so, by graphic, visual principles. The principles of writing are
based on a logic of time and sequence. Graphic principles are
based on a logic of spatiality and simultaneity. A shift towards
the latter principles is evident in the increase in the number of
images per page, the increasingly diverse typography, used to
mark off parts of writing previously organized in paragraphs,
and the increase in the oating of writing and image on the
page. In sum, we see a clear shift from predominantly written
text set in constrained typography and conned to a rigid, sin-
gle- or two-column grid to a composition of (typo)graphically
irregular writing and image-based elements placed uidly on a
two-page spread.
So what has English gained and lost when moving from one
design to another? In curricular terms, the changes in design
show how English as a subject is increasingly chunked up into
units which meet the tightly framed requirements of the na-
tional curriculum. In the 1930s, English is a story organized
into a number of chapters. In the contemporary context, Eng-
lish is a programme of study organized into one-hour lessons,
which in turn consist of a number of discrete entities. What
does not seem to have changed in relation to the increased vi-
sualization of the subject is the understanding of what counts
as English subject matter. English subject matter may well
have changed, but these changes do not seem to account for
the changes in design. For instance, there are more images in
textbooks now but the effect of taking them out is rather dif-
ferent from that of the same process in Science textbooks. In
English, we would still be left with a cohesive text, while in
Science the text would no longer be cohesive (Bezemer and
Kress, 2008).
In pedagogic terms, changes in design are perhaps more pro-
found, signifying changes in the construction of social rela-
tions between textbook makers and users in the process of
recontextualization. Whatever the school subject, discourses
produced in formal and informal sites outside school are trans-
formed along the lines of the social organization of the new
site in the process of re-contextualization. Discourses are
260 ViSuAl cOmmunicAtiOn 8 (3)
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moved from the originating site of production to a pedagogic
site. We have seen that this process of recontextualization in-
volves shifts in semiotic work done by textbook makers and
users. Some work has moved from users to makers: an increas-
ing number of images expand and frame what is written (i.e.
literary works and a literary apparatus); increasingly, state-
ments about the literary work are made before it is presented;
line numbers have emerged, as well as annotations and glosses.
Other work has moved from makers to users, such as drawing
relations between different parts of the text. Yet other work
has remained stable: textbook makers still use a linear order-
ing of the text to control users reading paths.
Thus we see how the multimodal design of a textbook, like
the design of any other medium, shapes learning. The multi-
modality of the design allows textbook makers to mix different
theories of learning: work involved in one mode may have
shifted from textbook author to learner, suggesting a shift
from transmission to collaboration, for instance in connect-
ing propositions articulated in writing; in another mode, work
may have shifted from teacher to learner; in both cases, one
might recognize a shift towards socio-constructivist theories of
learning. Yet, in other modes, we see a shift in the opposite di-
rection: from work done by the learner to work done by the
textbook maker or teacher; for instance in annotating a poem.
In other words, changes in pedagogy over the last 70 years can-
not be summarized as a shift from models of transmission to
collaborative models of learning. Rather we see a mixture of
such models, sometimes within one and the same textbook.
These mixtures may be deliberate attempts to synthesize dif-
ferent notions of learning and an increasingly diverse audi-
ence, they may also be the outcome of a less than concerted
effort to produce textbooks based on a shared understanding
of learning. Having shifted away from the single-authored
textbook, such design work is now more important than
ever before.
261 Bezemer & KreSS: ViSuAlizing engliSh
AcKnOWleDgementS
This article draws on an ongoing research
project, Gains and Losses: Changes in Repre-
sentation, Knowledge and Pedagogy in Learn-
ing Resources (20072009), funded by the
Economic and Social Research Council (RES-
062230224).
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BiOgrAPhicAl nOteS
JEFF BEZEMER is Research Ofcer at the
Centre for Multimodal Research, the Institute
of Education, University of London. He is Co-
Investigator of various ESRC funded projects
around multimodal representation and com-
munication. He is interested in the ethnogra-
phy and semiotics of graphic design in print
and digital media.
Address: Institute of Education, 20 Bedford
Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK.
[email: j.bezemer@gmail.com]
GUNTHER KRESS is Professor of Semiotics
and Education and Director of the Centre for
Multimodal Research at the Institute of Edu-
cation, University of London. He is interested
in questions of meaning and its semiotic real-
izations in interrelation with social and cul-
tural organization.
Address: as Jeff Bezemer.
[email: g.kress@ioe.ac.uk]
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