a postcolonial analysis of the images in the official iranian english language teaching textbooks

Postcolonial analysis can be employed as an intricate perspective for investigating the cultural nuances, complications, and forces that could bend the domestic representations of a culture from within and without. this can particularly be evident in the case of language teaching textbooks that officially and predominantly open up a channel towards the other language and culture for the learners. filtered by the authorities, materials developers, and socio-political forces, language textbooks can be considered the manifestation of an underlying postcolonial forces, an area of challenge between the other's bending forces and domestic resistance. accordingly, this study aims to follow up the changes that the pictorial representations have had during the last roughly 50 years in the official english language textbooks in iran relying on the postcolonial perspective. in doing so, representative samples of images in the three domestically produced packages, namely, graded series, right path to english series, and prospect/vision series were analyzed. assuming that the there was a deep-seated socio-political paradigm shift from the pahlavi's monarchy regime to the islamic republic of iran, as well as the early conditions of the latter governing system to the recent iranian modernism, it was generally found that there were different qualitatively significant changes with respect to the characterizations, world conceptualization, work-related gender-affiliated distribution, socio-cultural roles, among others, from the pre-islamic revolution, to the early and late periods of islamic republic of iran so far as the pictorial representations in the textbooks are concerned. the findings could be fruitful for material developers and teachers to be culturally, socio-politically, and ideologically aware in the pre-, while, and post-stages of development and teaching of materials.