Ideologies of English in a Chinese high school EFL textbook: a critical discourse analysis

Abstract

In this article we examine ideologies of English in present-day China with a special focus on textbook discourse. The research framework is informed by critical theories on language and education. Critical discourse analysis is applied as a methodological approach characterized by a socially committed attitude in the explanation and interpretation of text. The study finds evidence of: (a) a selective representation of the history of English, (b) shallow sociolinguistic explanations, and (c) grammatical prescriptivism. These issues attest to the Anglo-centric language ideologies assuming the sociolinguistic “neutrality” and grammatical “uniformity” of English. In response, we argue for a multicultural and cosmopolitan perspective on curriculum development marked by an intercultural understanding of both the global and the local.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 81 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.