Critical Discourse Analysis of Literary Texts of NCTB English for Today (Class II - Class VIII) Textbooks: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

This research has attempted an analysis of the Literary Texts included in the NCTB English for Today (Class II - Class VIII) Textbooks from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) which is fundamentally a sociolinguistic paradigm to find and locate the internal ideological, social, ethical, moral and political implications encoded in the texts. CDA has been adopted both as a theoretical and methodological framework to carry out the research. Literary texts like poetry, short story etc. have been used as a secondary source materials and data collected from students and teachers from 20 Government primary schools and 10 secondary schools covering 1500 students and 150 teachers as primary data for this research. The primary data has been collected through survey questionnaire and focused group discussion. The collected data has been analyzed using qualitative methods like Content analysis, Narrative analysis, Thematic analysis, Grounded theory (GT) and Interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA). Various Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) like ATLAS.ti, Dedoose (mixed methods), MAXQDA (mixed methods), NVivo and QDA MINER have been used where necessary to analyze in-depth interviews. The collected data have been analyzed using NVivo software depending on the similarities; the data have been then grouped into categories and themes. These patterned themes have emerged objectively out of the data as emergent themes. The findings from the data shows that 33% of the total student respondents do not at all read the literary texts, 33% of the teacher respondents do not teach or discuss literary texts in the classrooms and only 16% of the students read the literary texts on their own. The literary texts are totally skipped and ignored by around 8% of the student respondents and only 8% of students and teachers read and teach the literary texts effectively as intended. Other results from the data analysis show that majority ..............