Illustrations have been regarded as the supplementary pictures to help learners have a better understanding of their textbooks in the sense that they are an eye-catcher strong enough to trigger students' curiosity and motivation. So it is safe to say ...
Illustrations have been regarded as the supplementary pictures to help learners have a better understanding of their textbooks in the sense that they are an eye-catcher strong enough to trigger students' curiosity and motivation. So it is safe to say that better illustrations are an important factor for better textbooks.
The purpose of their study is to analyze the illustrations of secondary English textbooks, the main focus of which falls on the students' improvement of their learning motivation and collaboration. For this purpose, I analyzed the illustrations of 12 English textbooks in terms of illustration distribution in the pages in question and the guidelines of topics, vocabulary words, cultures, and communicative activities.
From this analysis, I got the following findings recommended to be reflected on the textbooks by the 7th National Curriculum.
First, the illustrations of each book are judged to be presented for each of 4 skills. To mention the depiction of topics, almost all topics are illustrated in most of the textbooks; some topics are left untouched in some textbooks. So, they should develop a better variety of subject matters to assist in the learners' advancement of knowledge and sentiment.
Second, when a text book presents new vocabulary words, its illustrations are effective for students to remember ones, but most textbooks had much fewer new vocabulary words that recommended by the Curriculum. All the text books should develop various methods including illustrations to present new vocabulary.
Third, every textbook carries illustrations on the culture which the 7th National Curriculum required. However, while they deal well comparatively with the lifestyles and language-cultures of English-speaking countries, they are short of linguistic or non-linguistic behavior styles in non-English cultures. In order to present a wider world view, illustrations should be offered about various fields of culture.
Fourth, for communicative functions, they are verbally well expressed and appropriately depicted by illustrations. Interestingly, the illustrations for expression of intellectual attitude are one of the majority of the whole illustrations.
Based on the above mentioned findings, we can conclude that the illustrations are not sufficient, in terms of the standards of the 7th National Curriculum. Therefore, the textbooks to succeed the current ones should be made of illustrations, which are easy to be used at class and textbook-makers should take into consideration about a more and better appearance of illustrations as well.