Normality, Values and Affiliation: A Preliminary Approach to Ideology in the EFL Textbooks

CELI, MARIA ALEJANDRA

Córdoba

Congreso; 13th LATIN AMERICAN SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE (ALSFAL); 2017

Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

The selection of textbooks for the EFL school classroom locally is still very much dependent on issues such as syllabus demands, motivational factors for students, the treatment of grammar and lexis, and the promotion of certain book series by publishing houses that helps set up a trend for the adoption of them. This paper addressed the need to consider EFL textbooks for the local school classrooms critically and, more specifically, the need to analyze the ideological values the textbook authors seem to endorse and to try to affiliate their intended users with, an aspect often disregarded when selecting classroom material. This study specifically attempted to explore: i) how normality and typicality are construed in EFL textbooks; ii) what are the belief and value systems underlying such representations of the normal or typical that students are expected to affiliate with; iii) what community of readers English textbooks seek to align with, and, given the findings relating to the previous three questions, iv) how appropriate EFL textbooks are for the different educational contexts within the local community. The study drew on the transitivity system developed by M. K. Halliday and colleagues. As a model of the processes and associated semantic configurations of participants and circumstances (Halliday 1985; Martin, Matthiessen & Painter 1997; Matthiesssen 1995), the transitivity system offers great potential for uncovering the ideological basis of such representations since transitivity configurations can evoke normality among many other kinds of judgments and attitudes in general (Martin and White 2005). Yet, appraisal resources were not explored in this study, which was based on the analysis of thirty (30) texts taken from four (4) different EFL textbooks, classified into 6 different groups in terms of field and then analyzed in the light of the transitivity system. The texts selected were all included as models for writing in the textbooks, with the main participant in them vicariously representing the textbook-user. Results showed that certain actions, habits and attributes relating to issues such as parent-children relations, marriage, family, and women’s roles were prevailingly depicted as normal across most field groups. In addition, there were certain activity sequences (Martin and Rose 2003) instantiated frequently across field groups that served to naturalize certain behaviors as normal, reflecting a belief value system the authors resorted to affiliate their readers.