Since the 70s, in various parts of the world, researchers in education, linguistics and multimodal communication have been concerned with the language of school textbooks.In general, this interest is owing to concerns with regard to academic performance and the aim is to generate knowledge which will lead to improvements in the quality of textbooks and, in consequence, better performance.This Round Table explores the relations between linguistic, discourse and multimodal features of textbooks and other aspects of the educational process.Specifically, we analyze, on the one hand, some of the ways in which the language of school textbooks has a positive or negative influence on learning processing, making the understanding and assimilation of concepts easier or more difficult, and, on the other hand, the ideologies which underlie textbook discourse and their influence on the education for citizenship of children and young people.We begin with a brief history of textbooks and a description of the ways in which teachers their classes do or do not make up for the deficiencies of texts.Secondly, we identify some discourse features which cause difficulties, we describe levels of learning attained by students and present a methodological proposal for the mediation of texts by teachers.In the third and final section, we analyze the use of images, the meanings they bring to the text and the ways in which they contribute to the construction of historical explanations.We present examples of texts in use in three Latin American countries, namely Argentina, Colombia and Chile in the fields of Social and Natural Sciences.