Abstract
Promoting equity and diversity within the classroom and the wider school culture is often overlooked in most educational contexts. The focus on student diversity is important as teachers need to be able to use classroom instruction and communication to make their classes inclusive for all learners. Yet, how can classrooms be inclusive and safe learning environments that offer all students the space to grow and reach their full potential? How can teachers design and deliver lessons so that all learners feel they belong to the school community? How can teachers help their learners appropriate pedagogical content on their own terms? These are concerns this paper attempts to answer. Focusing on English Language Teaching (ELT) material, it discusses how educational discoureses in textbooks reproduce inequalities that exist outside of the classroom and how critical discourse analysis (CDA) can be used to deconstructs texts in order to explore ways in which they relate to broader sociopolitical contexts. Drawing on selected tenets of CDA, this study discusses how they can be used as an analytical tool to critically examine the relations between discourse, power, dominance, and social inequality present in textbooks and identify ways in which educators can adapt and appropriate material in ways that help their learners to build on the cultural and linguistic capital they bring with them to the classroom.
Highlights
In any classroom, in any social context, in any part of the world, no two learners are alike
How are inequalities that exist in the larger society reproduced in textbooks? How do existing school curricula, and the textbooks, sufficiently address the needs of this diverse community? How can classrooms be made more inclusive? How can teachers be assisted to critically analyze the curricula in ways to help them design lessons that are inclusive and effective? How can teachers make their classrooms inclusive so they can cater to the needs of a diverse student population? This is an even greater challenge for English language teachers as they need to introduce their learners to the language and the content and to help them appropriate the language in their own terms
While there are inherent differences between the visual images and verbal messages, images could be analyzed along linguistic lines: What in language is realized by locative prepositions, is realized in pictures by the formal characteristics that create the contrast between the foreground and background
Summary
In any social context, in any part of the world, no two learners are alike. In educational contexts where the students use the textbooks to prepare for standardized high stake examination, what counts as legitimate language is the language that is present in the textbooks This language and the content in textbooks might be familiar to students from dominant and elite social groups, it might be very distant to minority learners and learners from disadvantaged backgrounds. In his discussion about forms of capital, Bourdieu (1986) argues that each individual possesses different types of capital, and that this capital has different values in different contexts. This linguistic capital can later be turned into economic capital in the form of access to better educational and employment opportunities
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