Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs
Publication Date
7-1-2016
Abstract
Using critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a research method, I investigated in the present study the discursive intersections between language and ideology with respect to social power and identity in two high school English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) textbooks in Saudi Arabia. Specifically, I critically analyzed how social power and identity based on gender and race were discursively represented in these EFL textbooks. I also critically examined how banking education and neoliberalism as a western political and socioeconomic ideology shaped the content of these EFL textbooks. The results indicate that the overt and hidden discourses in the EFL textbooks I analyzed serve as a state apparatus to reproduce and perpetuate certain neoconservative and neoliberal ideologies and interests including males' supremacy and dominance, patriarchy, sexism, women's subordination and marginalization, functional illiteracy, meritocracy, individualism, and the achievement ideology. The results also reveal that the EFL textbooks I explored serve to promote banking education, depoliticize English language teaching and learning, legitimate and perpetuate white male supremacy, institutional colorblind racism, and the racialization of the English language and the idealized native-speaker's identity of English.
Keywords
Language ideology, language and power, social identity, critical literacy, critical pedagogy, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, critical discourse analysis, neoliberalism, banking education, race, gender, hidden curriculum, Standard English, TESOL, EFL, ELT, textbooks, and Saudi Arabia.
Document Type
Dissertation
Language
English
Degree Name
Educational Linguistics
Level of Degree
Doctoral
Department Name
Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies
First Committee Member (Chair)
Crawford-Garrett, Dr. Katherine
Second Committee Member
Trinidad Galvan, Dr. Ruth
Third Committee Member
Chamcharatsri, Dr. Pisarn Bee
Recommended Citation
Al Jumiah, Abdullah. "Language, Power, and Ideology in High School EFL Textbooks in Saudi Arabia." (2016). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/educ_llss_etds/57