ABSTRACT

English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers and students are often pressured to use generic, globally published textbooks featuring ‘inner-circle’ social realities. While some studies look at specific instances of content that socially marginalizes their intended audiences, few attempt comprehensive examinations of the multimodal ensembles on each opened page. Inspired by critical discourse studies that problematize some textbooks as vehicles for social injustice, this study features a novel, critical multimodal analysis process (CMAP) to look closer at the discourse in a popular textbook, asking: (1) What power relations and ideologies are harbored in the multimodal discourse? (2) What dominant narratives do the lessons appear to teach? After analyzing six units of lessons in a popular, globally published EFL textbook, CMAP reveals dominant inner-circle perspectives and othering, to which this study collectively labels innercirclism. Considering globally published EFL textbooks continue to be a popular choice for academic programs in expanding circle nations, the implications of this study suggest innercirclism diminishes the pedagogical vision of the teacher to ensure the value of their students’ investment in English language learning.

摘要

英语作为外语 (EFL) 的教师和学生经常被迫使用具有“内部圈子”社会现实的通用、全球出版的教科书。虽然一些研究着眼于在社会上将目标受众边缘化的内容的具体实例，但很少有人尝试对每个打开的页面上的多模态集合进行全面检查。受批判性话语研究的启发，这些研究将一些教科书问题化为社会不公正的载体，本研究采用新颖的批判性多模态分析过程 (CMAP) 来仔细研究流行教科书中的话语，并提出以下问题：(1) 什么权力关系和意识形态是隐藏在多模态话语中？(2) 这些课程似乎教授了哪些主要叙述？在分析了一本流行的、全球出版的 EFL 教科书中的六个单元后，他者，本研究将其统称为内圈主义。考虑到全球出版的 EFL 教科书仍然是不断扩大的圈子国家学术课程的热门选择，这项研究的意义表明，内圈主义削弱了教师的教学视野，以确保学生在英语语言学习上的投资价值。