Analyzing the visual-text relationship in the 4th grade elementary school science textbook

This study examines the relationships between visual images and texts in the 4th-grade Science textbooks. This research was conducted following the taxonomy identified by Marsh and White (2003) in their work "A Taxonomy of Relationships Between Images and Text". 374 visual images, consisting of 238 photographs, 114 drawings/illustrations, 20 other visuals, 1 symbol, and 1 graph were found in the 4th-grade science textbooks. Another finding indicated that each visual is often associated with two or more categories. Many visuals in the Science textbooks serve the function of concretization. Concretization is one of the functions closely related to text. However, it is observed that other functions, especially emotion extraction, control, organization, and explanation, are less represented in this teaching material. The lack of functions such as attentiongrabbing, motivation, placement, perspective creation, comparison, and parallelism, especially, can limit the potential of textbooks to attract students' attention and deepen their conceptual understanding. The study findings led to the following suggestions: the diversity of visual-text relationships in textbooks can be increased. Visuals should be placed in harmony with the text and support the meaning of the text. Interactive visuals can be expanded to make the relationships between the visual images and texts more effective.