Introduction

Abstract

As I collated the bibliographies from the individual chapters in this volume to compile a single one for the whole book I was struck by the range of the references. As might be expected in a book on language teaching materials, there were repeated references to the core texts in the ever growing materials literature — that much was to be expected. However, it was the range of references to other literatures that caught my attention. Names such as Basil Bernstein, Pierre Bourdieu, John Dewey, Friedrich Engels, Michel Foucault, Nancy Fraser, Paulo Freire, Anthony Giddens, Antonio Gramsci, Jean-François Lyotard and Edward Said (among others) were striking for two reasons. First, they were a clear indication that those writing about language teaching materials are drawing increasingly on a wider range of disciplines than has traditionally been the case — sociology, philosophy, cultural studies, political economy; and second, that the body of thinking these names represent is itself philosophically heterogeneous. It will be immediately obvious then that this book is a collaboration between a group of scholars who (given the book’s title) are united in thinking critically about language teaching materials, but who are (as will become evident) far from being as one in their intellectual take on the objects of their scrutiny — the materials themselves.