Zare, Roghaye

Global Orientation, Gender Construction, and Consumer Culture in EFL Textbooks: Solution Series in Focus

Abstract One of the most significant aspects of English language teaching textbooks isthe representation of cultural issues EFL textbooks are undoubtedly influenced bythe beliefs and ideologies of their authors and publishers Certain cultural aspectsare deliberately included in these textbooks and other dimensions may indirectlyaffect them Teenagers as the influential members of society constitute asignificant part of the audience of the EFL textbooks The present study was aimedto investigate the representation of three cultural issues including globalorientation gender construction and consumer culture in English languagetextbooks of Solutions second edition In this research an adapted form ofFairclaugh s 1992 Critical Discourse Analysis CDA model was used to analyzethe conversations and reading passages of the textbooks The terms conceptuallyassociated with the cultural aspects were selected and the words frequencies werecounted Then the words were semantically categorized and due to time and scopeconstraints those terms with high frequencies and direct conceptual relationshipwith the cultural domains were considered as the main collection of the data to beanalyzed The obtained results demonstrated that concerning global perspective theorientation of the textbooks is more towards the representation of inner circlecountries or in other words the target culture based on Kachru s model of WorldEnglishes Regarding gender representation parts of the textbooks are partiallygendered although gender equality has been taken into considerations in other parts Finally considering consumerism various signs of consumer culture werediscovered in different semantic categories of words adopted in the textbooks Thisstudy could be useful for the educational authorities to make a comparison betweenthe cultural issues represented in localized and international EFL textbooks toidentify the potential cultural gaps concerning three introduced cultural domains inlanguage learning materials Keywords critical discourse analysis global orientation gender construction consumerism EFL textbooks world Englishes VII