REPRESENTATION of the THEME “FUTURE" in NEW ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS for VIETNAMESE HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

The study was conducted with a view to investigating the representation of the theme “future” in the series of new English textbooks for Vietnamese high school students through the lens of the transitivity system. The research, having adopted the M. A. K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics as the main analytical framework, yielded several important findings related to how processes, participants and circumstances were distributed throughout seven targeted units. The results indicate that Material and Relational processes were the most prevalent ones while Behavioral process was the least common process. Additionally, circumstances of location and cause were the most popular types which were in contrast with circumstances of matter and angle - the least preferred ones. Accordingly, several conclusions were drawn concerning the representation of five sub-themes (including “Education in the future", “Cities in the future", “Health and Longevity", “Science in the future" and “Career in the future"), as well as that of the overarching theme “Future”. Overall, textbook developers incline to believe that humans (especially high school students) are perceived as the active future shapers in almost every aspect of their lives.