Within the 'Educational Chasm': The Chilean ELT Textbook and the Development of Multimodal Literacy

Since the mid-90s, a growing concern has emerged regarding text comprehension from a multimodal perspective. In the Chilean educational context, multimodality has been highlighted in the official programs of the Ministry of Education. The present study examines one of the official Chilean ELT school textbooks, investigating whether its reading comprehension questions align with the country's interest in developing multimodal literacy. This analysis employs Unsworth et al.'s (2019) taxonomy for classifying question types to examine 17 while-reading sections, comprising 216 questions. The findings reveal a predominant focus on questions that can be answered by reading the written text without looking at the pictures as well as a lack of images in several reading passages. These results highlight the crucial role that teachers play in complementing the school textbooks, enabling students to develop multimodal literacy as well as the necessity for textbook designers to recognize the pivotal role of images in comprehending multimodal texts.