A Social Semiotic Analysis of Register Variables in the Indonesian Government-Distributed English Textbook (original) (raw)
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This article problematizes current, quantitative approaches to the analysis of culture in foreign language textbooks as objectifying culture, and offers an alternative, semiotic framework that examines texts, images, and tasks as merely engendering particular meanings in the act of semiosis. The authors take as a point of departure developments within the social sciences that have questioned monolithic conceptualizations of culture as well as recent arguments that stress intercultural citizenship and global cultural consciousness as key goals of (foreign) language learning. The authors argue that such transformative pedagogic agendas require a more dynamic understanding of how culture figures in teaching materials and of the processes through which learners engage with those materials. Through excerpts from two English as a foreign language textbooks written by and for Hungarians, the authors illustrate a semiotic analytic approach that underscores two key insights: (1) that learners’ meaning making in the classroom tends to be heavily guided and (2) that images and texts, even those with supposed cultural meaning or focus, seem to foster mainly linguistic competence. The article makes the case that images and texts should be harnessed more explicitly to develop a critical and reflexive understanding of culture, self, and other.
Indonesian EFL Textbook Analysis
While the inclusion of moral education (character education) in English language teaching (ELT) globally receives considerable attention, evaluating ELT textbooks as a moral/character agent remains under-examined since such textbooks are assumed to be value-free (Gebregeorgis MY. Afr Educ Rev 13:119–140, 2016a; Gray J. Appl Linguist 31:714–733, 2010). Informed by critical systemic functional linguistics (Fairclough N, Discourse and social change. Blackwell Publishing, Malden, 1992; Halliday MAK. Language as social semiotic. Edward Arnold, London, 1978; Kress G, van Leeuwen T. Reading images: the grammar of visual design (2nd edn). New York, Routledge, 2006), I contend that language textbooks should be viewed as sociocultural artifacts that feature particular moral values or character virtues. To fill this need, this critical micro-semiotic discourse study examines in what ways values are portrayed in one Indonesian Ministry of National Education-approved secondary school English textbook, which deploys various lexico-grammatical and discursive resources. This critical analysis reveals that visual artifacts and verbal texts with different genres in the textbook represent a myriad of values of which both teachers and students need to become aware. The implication of this study suggests that both teachers and students need to equip with skills in critical thinking and reading as well as in critical language awareness analysis. Both teachers and students should have the opportunity to engage critically with textbooks as a value agent, for instance.
Literary fiction, ranging from traditional folk tales to experimental fiction, is a highly privileged genre in high school subject English classrooms. However, rarely do teachers and students analyze from a critical perspective how particular patterns of language (e.g. transitivity, modality) function to construct characters, setting and ideological world views in fiction . The chapter first provides a theoretical and literature overview on how an SFL instructional approach to literary narrative fosters critical language awareness . It then chronicles how an urban high school teacher immersed her upper level students in an SFL analysis of the patterns of appraisal, identification and modality in the popular novel Harry Potter . This apprenticeship afforded students with metalinguistic resources to support and refute critical readings of this literary genre (e.g. related to gender, social power relations). The chapter concludes by discussing how a critical SFL instructional approach to literary fiction can be extended to other genres and used in multiple settings with students of contrasting ages, abilities, and backgrounds-to engage students in thinking critically about the relationship between language, power and world view.
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This paper aims at examining social functions, schematic structure, transitivity, and modality in narrative texts in an English textbook published by the Indonesian government and used at the tenth grade English classes. Three narrative texts were found in the textbook and selected as samples. Hallidayan concepts of social functions, schematic structure, transitivity and modality were used as theoretical epistemological concepts and his lexico-grammatical analytical framework was used as a methodological procedure of data analysis. Clauses in the three texts (i.e., Issumboshi, The Legend of Malin Kundang, and Strong Wind) were coded by numbering them and analyzed in a series of systemic functional linguistic analyses: Theme-Rheme, process-type analysis, mood-residue analysis, and functional analysis. The texts display this schematic pattern: orientation^evaluation^compilcation^resolution. The absence of reorientation within the generic structure implies the written nature of the tex...
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This study aims to suggest a checklist for teachers and researchers to analyze English as a second or foreign language textbooks from a sociolinguistic perspective. In the literature there is not a checklist or framework by which English textbooks can be evaluated considering the sociolinguistics issues raised in this study. After obtaining expert opinion and a piloting on 8 textbooks used in state schools in Turkey, a checklist consisting 6 criteria was suggested. Then, the check list was applied on the 9th grade English book ReLearn (Karamil & Birincioglu Kaldar, 2019) used in state schools in Turkey to demonstrate how the checklist can be utilized. The findings suggest that from a sociolinguistic perspective, the book in focus occasionally conforms to the sociolinguistic concerns while it needs some qualitative improvements. Improvements in providing genuine speakers of non-native and non-standard accents of English rather than using standard accent vocalizations for the speakers...
Semio-Think: Theory of Semiotics and Signifying Practices in Language and Literature Classrooms
Essentials of Applied Linguistics and Foreign Language Teaching: 21st Century Skills and Classroom Applications , 2021
Dating back to ancient times (Baer, 1983), semiotics takes its modern foundations from two philosophers, Charles Sander Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, expressing ideas on semiotics unawarely of each other in different continents (Yücel, 2015). As Danesi puts (2017), semiotics is a “metalanguage” (p. 61) that is enchantingly possible to be applied to a broad range of subject areas. This characteristic renders semiotics a multi and interdisciplinary branch, ranging from the domains of language and culture to philosophy and science. Whatever the subject area is, the primary tendency of semiotic ramifications like “Peircians”, “Lotmanians” and “Greimassians” is to put forward possible theories on “signs”, “culture” and “signification” by the evaluation of relations between signs whether verbal or non-verbal (Landowski, 2015, p. 84). Language and literature, both the cultural heritage of a community, are unsurprisingly under the research area of semiotics since they reflect the combination of signs within these cultures. Besides, they are nested entities because the unique material of literature is language. This fundamentally brings the use of literature in language classrooms (Carrio-Pastor, 2019; Hewings et al., 2016; Lazar, 2009), except for the sole systematic settings of literary education curricula (Blocksidge, 2000; Chambers & Gregory, 2006; Widdowson, 2013). Accordingly, it is possible to suggest that the primary purpose of this study is to propose one of the aforesaid semiotic approaches, so-called “Greimassian semiotics” (Yücel, 2001, p. 9), as a method of analysis to language and literature classes. Doing this is believed to provide informational and practical insight to both the teachers and the students, who are already concerned with teaching and learning a language and its literature. The reason for choosing the semiotic approach of Algirdas Julien Greimas, the founder of Paris School of Semiotics, among many others, is that it is one of “the first and most developed semiotic theory” (Yücel, 2012, p. 93), which seeks for signification process in literary-narrative artworks. With its goals, research areas and own analysis method, Greimas semiotics has been called “literary-narrative semiotics” (Yücel, 2012, p. 93) since it flourished. Besides, it is also believed in the study that the presentation of information on the application of this method will help students overcome the challenge of seeing problematic areas in literary works that have an idiosyncratic semantic universe created by the logical systematization of signs. Additionally, the conscious act of unfolding the universe of texts will help practitioners to systematize the reading process to increase critical thinking skills and to make the recondite points more explicit and comprehensible. As a signification theory, Literary semiotics requires apprehension of different semantic structures of the texts to cope with difficulties in explaining the complicated interaction between signs, which facilitates understanding the meaning formation in literary texts. However, it has specific rules, terminology, and analysis instruments that are sometimes hard to conceive. Therefore, in the analysis part of the study, the clarifications on the successive steps and tools of a systematized literary semiotic analysis will be made along with the instructional questions to be followed by teachers and students. For the semiotic analysis, “The Last Leaf” (1995), which is one of the famous short stories of William Sydney Porter, a well-known American writer with the pseudonym “O. Henry”, has been selected. The analysis will be performed under three headings, each indicating a specific meaning layer of text. These are respectively discursive, narrative and deep levels.
A semiotic exploration of cultural potential in EFL textbooks
This paper introduces a Peircean semiotic approach to analysing the cultural content of EFL textbook materials. It argues that while traditional content analyses may provide valuable insights, they fail to provide a comprehensive picture of the cultural meaning potential of textbooks since they ignore a key element: how language learners interact with texts and visuals imbedded in the framework of a pedagogic task. We demonstrate how cultural meanings can emerge through processes of unguided semiosis, supported by sharing and reflection in a complex, non-linear and essentially dynamic learning environment. For this to happen, however, teachers may need to reconsider their current approaches to teaching culture, embrace complexity, and allow order to emerge from chaos in their classrooms. The paper suggests that collaboratively negotiated and shared (re)presentations of cultural meaning contribute to the development of the learners' global cultural awareness and prepares them for intercultural citizenship in our globalized world.
Literary Texts and the EFL/ESL Classrooms
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The importance of language has been a source for many discussions on the academic as well as political levels. Its different functions have caused scholars in the field to go beyond looking at it from the traditionally concentrated on linguistic oriented approaches. And though we realize that we remain very concerned with accurate representation in terms of the forms and structures used in a language, as Yule (1996) explains, we need to know what it is used for and its interpretations and intent. Language realizes discursive and ideological systems which are used as powerful tools to exercise power in modern democratic societies (Kress, 1990) and language in literary texts has been shown to have the power to socialize, acculturate, and influence perceptions and reality (Holmes, 2001). This paper examines literature as a 'discourse type' (Cook, 1994) whose language use must not just be interpreted on the linguistic level, but must be interpreted, as Duranti (2005) explains, as the use of the linguistic code(s) in the conduct of social life. If we consider a literary text as Holmes (2005; 2001) does, as a representation of a language which is social-semiotic and representative of a culture or society, in which all aspects of that society are deemed as a system of signs, where culture and conventions are culture bound, then literary texts are laden with cultural aspects which need to be considered in the literature classroom. And, any approach used to deal with such texts in literature courses, especially ESL/EFL contexts, should include the analysis of discourse.
Socio-Economic Representations in English Language Textbooks Used in Regional Indonesia
The Asian EFL Journal , 2019
This study aimed to examine socio-economic representations in senior high school ELT textbooks used in Lombok as a typical region of Indonesia. Data for this study were purposively collected from five English textbooks used in senior high schools the island. Data were analyzed by employing Fairclough’s three-dimensional model (description, interpretation, and explanation) of critical discourse analysis. Findings of the study show that a significant portion of the texts still show inaccurate, inappropriate socio-economic representations of the students in all aspects under study. Results of analyses of the texts show that the texts use all types of processes and multimodal features; while contextual analyses show varieties in the time and place of the text production and the texts being referred to. Interpretation of the texts also shows producer’s and interpreter’s divergent, even conflicting perceptions of students’ representations. Finally, analysis of the power behind discourse that shaped and influenced presentation of the students’ representations in the textbooks includes institutional agents, namely, the government, the publisher, the recipient schools, and societal agents, namely, globalization of Western culture (and English as a global language), Indonesian culture and values, ICT (Internet), mass media, and the market.