Arab Educational Information Network

The Ministry of Education translated and adopted an American Series (McGraw-Hill) for science and mathematics education, while there are social differences between Saudi Arabia and USA, so this study aimed to study the social semiotics of the images in 8th grade science textbook. The study followed a qualitative approach, which analyzed 263 images of the science textbook, as non-human sample. The results found that 63 images (24%) which have been replaced or modified in such a way to adapted with the social context, 115 images (44%) replaced because of copy rights, while the others remain as the original textbook. This replacement and modification have some problems in the design of images, which cause contradiction of images with social context, or cause weakness in social function. These problem were: explicit contradiction of images with society' culture, probability of contradiction between the image and it's social function, contradiction between the image and it's social function, weak function of the image on original series, the direction of reading in Arabic language (right to left), and weak function of the image because of image modification. (Published Abstract)