Resumen de International and local curricula: The question of ideology
This article examines the ideological import of (a) a selection of internationally distributed ELT textbooks to find out whether a recurrent ideological pattern could be observed and (b) the ELT books used in Iranian high schools to see if the ideological import of these books was different from that of the internationally distributed ELT textbooks. To this end, the theory and procedures of critical discourse analysis (CDA), as expounded by Fairclough (1989), were applied to conversations in these textbooks and three dimensions of meaning – the social relations of textbook characters, their subject positions, and the content of the texts – were categorized and statistically analyzed. The analysis revealed that the internationally distributed ELT textbooks tend to represent a particular discourse type – the discourse of western economy and consumer society. Moreover, in the locally produced ELT materials, owing to the absence of certain topics and features, the preparation of the high school books appears to have been influenced by postrevolution norms and standards.
