.png)
28 Views
Society for Linguistic Anthropology
Volunteered - Oral Presentation Session
Abstract
This paper will address two important questions. First, what are the ideologies that are present in popular ESL speaking and listening textbooks for adults as sold by the major ESL publishers in the United States? Secondly, what are the various ways these ideologies are presented in speaking and listening texts to students? In order to analyze the ideologies I will use Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MMDA) (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001) as a theoretical framework. MMDA analyzes how pictures and words work together as an ensemble to create coherence. Coherence is achieved as the pictures and text work together to relate a message or ideology. A successful text then realizes the interests of its makers and relates this message clearly. In order to investigate these interests or ideologies I will use the most popular speaking and listening textbooks as defined by sales from the major ESL publishers in the United States. Additionally, I will use discourse analysis (DA) as a tool for my investigations. This is research technique produces replicable and valid inferences from texts and follows a structured and systematic design which involves careful documentation. This research technique is also useful for analyzing textbooks as representations. Using multimodal discourse analysis and discourse analysis I hope explore the different ideologies and discourses present in these texts.