Discourse Strategies in Promotional Materials of Global ELT Textbook Series

Abstract

In English Language Teaching (ELT), analyses of ideologies on the contents of ELT textbooks and studies of practices in classrooms have been given a lot of attention. However, only few studies to date have focused on the role ideology plays in the sales and consumption of textbooks, and how ideologies strategically help sustain the power of publishers, whose ‘authority’ in pedagogy is represented by those ELT materials. Placed in the field of critical discourse analysis and employing methods of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) (Wodak & Meyer, 2016), this study aims to investigate the use of discourse strategies in the online promotional materials of three global ELT textbook series namely (1) Cambridge English Empower (2) Headway (3) Life. The study addresses the research question: What discourse strategies are used to promote ELT textbook series on the websites of three global publishers? The results show that the three publishers of the three series Empower, Headway, and Life rely heavily on the use of typical uses of promotional language, particularly intensifications, and the textbooks, rather than teachers or learners, tend to be attributed most actions to the series materials. All three series also show an attempt to validate their reliability and trustworthiness through association to policy, testing, as well as other sources of authority. We conclude by reflecting on the ideologies reproduced through the use of promotional strategies and how important for teachers to reflect on ideologies that threaten to devalue their knowledge and disempower them.