To Örebro University

Our society has been through a development in our text culture. Back in the days the focus was only on the writing. It is very different today when both writing and image are in focus. Images have become more central and important to the text’s content and message. Today almost all text is multimodal which means that they include both writing and image. Against this background, the purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between image and writing and how they create meaning. The study is based on an analysis of two Swedish textbooks in science for early education. The chosen textbooks are No-boken and Boken om NO 1-3. These textbooks have been selected because they are being used in the education today, and because these books contain both image and writing. Our study answers following questions: What function does image have in relation to writing in the two textbooks, respectively? Are there any similarities or differences between the textbooks regarding to how image and writing create meaning? In our analysis we use Anders Björkvall’s (2009) tools to analyse the textbooks. The tools are: concurrence, complementarity, distance, framing and overlap. The result shows that image and writing either creates meaning through that image and writing mediates the same content and clarifies the message, or that image and writing mediates different content and complement each other. Our conclusion is that the images in the analyzed textbooks fill an important function in relation to the written text. Images and writing are two important elements to create meaning of a text. Another conclusion is that the images fill different functions depending on what content the book spread mediates. The relation between image and writing are important for the understanding of the content.