Discursive strategies of legitimating institutionalized values in educational settings: Experience of Japan

Abstract

The current paper focuses on the strategic aspect of discursive practice of transferring, legitimizing and reproducing institutionalized values in students' worldview with a subsequent transformation into the cultural scripts. The study is based on T. van Leeuwen's theory of the legitimation strategies. Researcher defines four major categories of strategies used in legitimizing: authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization, mythopoesis. Studying a process of legitimation in educational settings on the example of Japan illustrates the procedure of linguistics transfer of institutionalized values through various discourses and exposes language tools for social control. The results provide an opportunity to study the process of linguistic transfer of institutionalized values and their transformation into the cultural scripts in Russian discourse.