Current Trends in Critical Discourse Analyses of Textbooks: A Look at Selected Literature

Authors

  • Christopher Smith Carleton University
  • Jaffer Sheyholislami Carleton University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37213/cjal.2022.31515

Abstract

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) has increasingly served to examine the content of textbooks. Given momentum by critical social inquiry pertaining to textbook content, this study looks at peer-reviewed literature drawn from three scholarly databases (JSTOR, ERIC, and SAGE; cross-referenced with searches on Google Scholar) that use critical discourse analysis for those investigations. Reviewing the selected literature, this study asks: What are the most represented approaches of CDA used for examining textbooks? What contextual themes appear to draw the most attention? In what fields of study are the examined textbooks situated? How do these emergent themes appear to be connected? What areas of research appear lacking in the collected literature? The findings illustrate that, while the methods of CDA and types of textbooks examined are diverse, the lion’s share of contextual attention and critical utility appear to be given to foundational approaches to CDA and textbooks used for English language teaching. Further research directions on textbooks from a CDA perspective are discussed.

Author Biography

Jaffer Sheyholislami, Carleton University

After years of radio broadcasting in Iran, I completed my first Canadian degree at Fanshawe College, London, Ontario, in Library and Information Science, in 1993. After completing my B.A. in general linguistics—concurrent with a Certificate in Teaching English as a Second Language—I taught English to newcomers in Ottawa for several years. In the meantime, I devoted my MA research to a Systemic Functional Linguistics-informed Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of North American news discourse around international events. I continued to employ CDS/CDA in my PhD research, focusing on identity formation practices of Kurdish new media (specifically satellite TV and the Internet). The results of this and other related research projects have been published in a monograph, Kurdish Identity, Discourse and New Media, Palgrave Macmillan (2011), in addition to peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes published in North America, Europe, and the Middle East.

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Published

2022-03-07

How to Cite

Smith, C., & Sheyholislami, J. (2022). Current Trends in Critical Discourse Analyses of Textbooks: A Look at Selected Literature. Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 25(1), 47–63. https://doi.org/10.37213/cjal.2022.31515

Issue

Vol. 25 No. 1 (2022)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2022 Christopher Smith, Jaffer Sheyholislami

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