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Communicating ideas/news is the primary function of language. However, language does not usually fulfill this as it is expected to. To Dellinger (1995, p. 3) language, “can never appear by itself-it always appears as the representative of a system of linguistic terms, which themselves realize discursive and ideological system.” The present study, analyzing sports articles, aims at investigating the nature and importance of discourse in representing the desired players/ or teams. In other words, it is to examine the ways in which different teams are discursively constructed. More specifically, it shows how ‘our’ team versus ‘other’ (rival) team is shaped discursively. To do this, Hodge and Kress' (1996) model for Critical Discourse Analysis provides the framework with which the following texts have been approached. Four sport extracts, selected from two different issues of two different sport editorials, comprised the corpus of the study. The texts are analyzed with regard to three important properties of texts, i.e., grammar (with regard to two properties: syntagmatic models and transformations), vocabulary (functioning as adjectives, adverbs, and verbs, with their ideological significance), and modality (the degree of authority and certainty of an utterance). The study has revealed how the reporters, while apparently providing the readers with the information about the matches and important events, represent ‘ours’ and ‘others’ in the selected texts  the way they like and, thereby, influence the ideology of the reader.

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Gender representation has long been studied in both verbal and visual modes of ELT textbooks. However, regarding the visual mode, research has mainly focused on superficial analyses of how often each gender appears in different roles rather than on how the two genders are represented. The tools proposed in Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) social semiotics framework, however, permit deep analysis of images taking into consideration how pictorial elements are shown both alone and in relation to other pictorial elements, on the one hand, and the viewers on the other. Following the above-mentioned framework, the present study applied the three dimensions of representational, compositional and interactive meaning presented to 16 photographs randomly selected from the Interchange (Third Edition) series (Richards, 2005) to explore gender portrayals and disclose ideologies in the visual mode of the series. Qualitative data analysis showed some ideologies and stereotypical portrayals, each of which appeared either in one or a few photographs. Taken together, the findings indicated gender bias in favor of men in the series.