Current Trends in Critical Discourse Studies of Textbooks: A Look at Selected Literature

Abstract

Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) has increasingly served to examine the content of textbooks. Given momentum by critical social inquiry pertaining to textbook content, this study looks at peer-reviewed literature drawn from three scholarly databases (JSTOR, ERIC, and SAGE; cross-referenced with searches on Google Scholar) that use CDS for those investigations. Reviewing the selected literature, this study asks: What are the most represented approaches of CDS used for examining textbooks? What contextual themes appear to draw the most attention? In what fields of study are the examined textbooks situated? How do these emergent themes appear to be connected? What areas of research appear lacking in the collected literature? The findings illustrate that, while the methods of CDS and types of textbooks examined are diverse, the lion’s share of contextual attention and critical utility appears to be given to foundational approaches to CDS and textbooks used for English language teaching. Further research directions on textbooks from a CDS perspective are discussed.