The motif of achievement at the service of affiliation in EFL textbooks

CELI, MARIA ALEJANDRA

Mendoza

Jornada; I Jornadas de Estudios Lingüísticos (JELing); 2017

Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNCuyo

More often than not, English textbooks seem quite difficult to work with in public classrooms given the generality of the events, happenings and behaviors they depict to be appealing to a diversity of users in different communities. In this sense, this paper addresses the need to consider English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks critically since their selection in terms of Grammar and Lexis seems predominant to the detriment of other affiliative aspects. This study draws on the transitivity system within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as developed by M. K. Halliday and colleagues. This system allows for the identification of verbs and associated semantic configurations of participants and circumstances that are responsible for the representation of inner and outer experience and for the evocation of attitude in texts (Halliday 2014; Martin, Matthiessen & Painter 1997). Transitivity patterns thus are of great relevance when uncovering the ideological content and affiliative resources used in texts (Martin and White 2005). The aim of this study is to identify how these patterns construe certain habits and actions as “normal” or “typical” in a given tenor of existence, and to uncover how these configurations serve to build stereotypes and encode the motif of achievement built in EFL textbooks. In order to attain this aim, thirty (30) texts (taken from four (4) EFL textbooks) instantiated as models of writing for the textbook-users were organized in terms of field and analyzed in the light of transitivity. Results show that stereotypes seem to be at the service of affiliation as motifs that derive from the analysis of normality (or what is represented as normal in the texts). In this sense, adolescents are depicted mostly as motivated students, women as compulsive consumers, poverty as the result of negligence or incapacity, and adults as the uncontested authority. At the same time, achievement as well as lack of achievement constitute a motif instantiated by the activity sequence of “studying, graduating, succeeding at work, building a family and having children”, that cuts across most of the texts and that seems to be designed to effect affiliation with the potential textbook-user.