This thesis investigates the representations of English language coursebooks that are socially constructed by their producers (authors and editors) and their users (teachers and students). Systemic-functional linguistics and knowledge about representations from Cultural Studies and Social Psychology constitute the theoretical basis of the study, from a view of social construction of reality. More specifically, a semantic-discursive analysis and the grammar of visual design, both based on the systemic-functional theory of language, serve as guides for the discourse analysis. Using these theories, the thesis takes the English coursebook as a genre that is present in Brazilian educational culture and that carries other genres in itself; it is also an object of representation due to its political, economic, cultural and pedagogical relevance in society. Thus, this study presents an analysis of English coursebook producers’ discourse in five separate series, considering three genres written by authors and editors: catalogue advertisements, back cover blurbs and teacher’s manual introductions. The study also analyzes the users’ discourse through 12 interviews with teachers who adopt volumes from these series, and 116 questionnaires answered by their students. The coursebooks are adopted by five different teaching institutions located in Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro. This research is qualitative, characterized by multiplicity, and it uses a constructivist approach in the sense that the explicitness of the representations is expressed in the everyday use of language, which the analytical procedure identifies, categorizes, and systematizes from the recurrent verbal and non verbal elements in the corpus. This is one of the contributions of the research. The analysis indicates that producers and users, in general, represent the English coursebook as a source, an agent, the course, and an attraction. In the coursebook producers’ discourse, guide and facilitator are less recurrent representations. On the other hand, the analysis of the users’ discourse shows that teachers still represent the coursebook as an organizer, a base, a piece of merchandise, and a possibility. Differently from the producers, users (teachers and students), more recurrently, see the coursebook as a facilitator and a guide. The study shows that the same meaning resources, or similar ones, contribute towards the construction of the representations in and through language, and that the representations are themselves inter-related. These meaning resources are ideational, interpersonal and textual ones, and this suggests representations are not limited to ideational aspects of language only. Furthermore, this research also suggests these representations regulate coursebook producers’ and users’ social practices. The pedagogical contributions of the study may be the application of the knowledge produced here for teacher education; a greater awareness of the discourse on the English coursebook that might help in materials evaluation and coursebook selection processes; and a starting point for future investigations on the topic.