As it is known, English not only is the native language of multiple countries but it is also the international language used in business, education, and art around the world. As observed by Graddol (2012), English became the language of diversity and cultural exchange in
international and intra-national contexts, allowing the spread of diversity and multiculturalism.
English is broadly diffused and is the most common second language and foreign language learned in the world (Graddol 1997), furthermore, it is the most used and popular lingua franca in the history of the world, according to Melitz (2018) and Graddol (1997). Such role performed by the language means English is used through different cultures and countries as the universal language that connects people.
However, despite its diverse use for connecting people with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, it is not unusual to see English being defined as having only one or two
‘official’ varieties and only a few countries associated to it as official users of the language, as further observed by Widdowson (1994) and Davies (2009). After a quick observation, it is noticeable that English came to be a language with many varieties and uses throughout many different nations where it became an official language, but only a few of these varieties are legitimated and seen as the ‘correct’ or ‘official’ ones (Jenkins 2007).
Apart from having many new varieties, English became the world’s lingua franca, according to Jenkins (2007). Lingua franca is the function a language performs of being used
internationally as a common language among people with different linguistic backgrounds.
For being used by many people from different life contexts, cultures, and native languages,
the function of a lingua franca causes many changes and interferences in the English language, which is not well received by many native speakers. Jenkins (2007: 33-35) demonstrates that there is a strong anti-ELF (English as a lingua franca) sentiment in the English language teaching world motivated by conservative scholars and people involved in the huge business of ELT, which is very profitable through selling books, courses, proficiency exams, exchange programs, among others.
The ELT business thrives with the idea that only the varieties found in the Inner Circle (the definition used by Kachru (1985) to describe countries such as England, United States, Canada, and Australia, which would be the norm-providers of the language) should be taken into consideration and anything besides it is an unwanted deviation. This ideology works as a gatekeeper to research, validation, and study of any variety of the language that does not come from the Inner Circle nations, which is reflected not only in the academic field but also in the attitudes towards teaching and learning English (Jenkins 2007).
Still according to Jenkins (2007), another area immensely affected by this anti-ELF feeling is the teaching materials and classbooks, which end up not only bringing only one variation of the language when it comes to grammar but also only one cultural representation of the language, reinforcing the idea that English is owned by specific nations (Widdowson 1994) and anything other than that is an ‘error’ or ‘fraud’, as exemplified by Leung & Lewkowicz (2013). Leung & Lewkowicz (2013) exposes how class books often present sources
“predominantly from the Anglophone world, reflecting issues and topics of predominant interest to a limited audience primarily those familiar with British or American culture.”
(2013: 63) combined with the fact that the topics presented in those books were completely unrelated to the students’ realities. (2013).
With the aforementioned issues in mind, this study aims to analyze the English language class books ‘On track 8’ (2017), used in upper secondary education in Finland, and ‘Go for it 6’ (2019), used in basic education in Finland, both published by SanomaPro to investigate if this tendency of confining the cultural and linguistic representation of the English language only to a specific group of nationalities (when we know it is the official language of many nations) still prevails in current teaching materials.
With this overview in mind, the questions I aim to answer in my study are:
(1) Is the English language represented impartially in the books or is it associated with specific nations?
(2) What are the cultural aspects related to the English language in the books?
(3) What nations with English as their official language are represented in the book and how this representation is achieved?
I intend to achieve answers with the help of content analysis, which is a method of inferring meaning from the content of a book (White and Marsh 2006), critical discourse analysis, through spotting social or political influence in the content of the book analyzed (Litosseliti, L 2010), and, finally, qualitative research (Mligo, E. 2016) by drawing meaningful conclusion from the data gathered and analyzed.
SanomaPro, the publisher of the books analyzed in this study, kindly allowed the reproduction of some parts of its materials in this study. The latest books in each series, ‘On track 8’ and
‘Go for it 6’, were chosen to be analyzed so we could have the most up-to-date view and usage of the English language in the books. The aforementioned series were chosen for being
widely used in Finnish schools, therefore a good representation of the Finnish classroom practices when it comes to English teaching.
Figures 1 and 2. Cover of the book ‘On track 8’ and ‘Go for it 6’ by Sanomapro.
My book analysis is divided into cultural and grammatical aspects and will be executed as follows:
Cultural aspects: what cultural traits are being transmitted in the book? To what nations do they belong? Pictures, texts, discussion themes are to be analyzed, as well as the way the books portrait the culture and nation represented on them. What words are used to describe these nations and cultures? Is the representation done under a positive or negative
perspective?
The second part to be analyzed in my study is grammar and vocabulary. The topic to be observed is: What language varieties are present in the books when it comes to vocabulary and pronunciation? Is it just British and American varieties, or do we have new Englishes
varieties, such as Indian English, Singaporean English, Fiji English, among others being represented?
This part will focus on the lexicon and the IPA transcriptions in the glossary pages. The aim is to observe which variety (ies) of the language the lexicon and pronunciation presented are representing and how diverse they are.
Although both grammatical and cultural representations will be categorized and described as separate entities, the analysis of them will be complementary and juxtaposed. The first step of the analysis will be selecting pages of both books in which cultural aspects or language varieties are being transmitted. They are going to be displayed in the research as scanned pages.
After the first step, content analysis will take place as an objective description of what we find on each page and exercise selected and the entailments of them. As a research method, content analysis may be defined as “a research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from texts (or other meaningful matter) to the contexts of their use (Krippendorff, 2004, p. 18).” (White and Marsh, 2006: 26-27)
Later on, a discussion will be held about the content observed in the book under a critical discursive analysis perspective, which can be defined as “(…) [A]research specifically considers how language works within institutional and political discourses (…) in order to uncover overt or more often, covert inequalities in social relationships.” (Litosseliti, L 2010:
139). (Emphasis added).
Once the three aforementioned steps are completed, the most relevant images carrying a discursive content in the books will be analyzed also under a critical discursive perspective and added to the written content as a complementary signifier.
Finally, a conclusion will be drawn and a discussion will be proposed through a qualitative analysis of all the data gathered. The aims of qualitative research can be described as a method used to provide description and interpretation of a phenomena, as well as to verify the validity of theories (Mligo 2016).