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

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