Culture, Class and Power: A Critique of Pakistan English Language Textbooks

Abstract

This paper is part of a doctoral research project titled “Ideology andWorldview in Textbooks: A Study of Cultural Aspects in ELT in Pakistan”.It deals with the Critical Discourse Analysis of English language textbookspublished by Punjab Textbook Board and Oxford University Press(henceforth PTB and OUP) being taught at the secondary level in threedifferent schools in the city of Multan in Pakistan. The former are taught inthe state-run Urdu-medium schools and some of the private non-eliteEnglish-medium schools while the latter are taught in the elitist Englishmediumschools. This paper critically analyzes the discourse of thesetextbooks to explore certain themes/messages related to the Pakistani andWestern cultures. The findings suggest that in contrast to the OUPtextbooks, the PTB textbooks only represent the indigenous culture, whichcould be linked to the difference in the worldviews of the products of theseschools. The elite-school students unlike their state-run and non-eliteschool counterparts gain an easy access to domains of power via Englishand the Western culture. The English language and the Western culturedistance the elite class from the other classes and bring it closer to thecentre (West) which, in return, economically and politically helps itdominate and rule the lower and middle classes. The findings of thisresearch will help the policy makers, textbook authors and ELTpractitioners to realize the politics of language textbooks, and, thus, seek toestablish an egalitarian and symmetrical educational system.

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 — 13 citations exist upstream.

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