ADDRESSING DISABILITY REPRESENTATION IN THE INDONESIAN ELT TEXTBOOKS ENGLISH FOR NUSANTARA OF THE JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

ELT textbooks are pivotal in delivering foreign language materials and inserting moral and intercultural values. Particularly in the Merdeka curriculum, textbooks are essential for building students’ noble characters, promoting the values of equity and diversity, and reflecting inclusivity. In this regard, ELT textbooks are expected to provide inclusive learning materials, including the visual and textual representation of disabilities. As research on disability representation in Indonesian ELT textbooks has remained underexplored, this present research attempts to address the lacuna by discussing how people with disabilities are portrayed in the ELT textbooks English for Nusantara devoted to junior high school. The study employed a two-phase exploration of disability representation through content and multimodal discourse analysis, delving into textual and visual artifacts in the textbooks. The results reveal that the portrayal of people with disabilities in the textbooks is still limited. In addition, the textbooks describe the characters with disability in positive stereotypes, yet they do not provide sufficient representation within society. The researchers, thus, highlighted the need to cover more balanced and broader disability-related content both in texts and images in the ELT textbooks.