Cultural Promotion Through Language: A Case Study Of English Textbooks At Secondary Level In Different Provinces Of Pakistan

Abstract

Textbooks act as the embodiment of educational policy and are very important in the classroom. The content of these discourses reflects the country's existing cultural, religious or social norms and serves as a means of exercising power for ruling groups. This study deals among other things with the evaluation of secondary English textbooks in different provinces of Pakistan. The invisible or implicit ideological assumptions hidden in the content of these textbooks and the culture of language learning and teaching they foster. These textbooks (selected for this study) have been used in ELT in different provinces of Pakistan. The research framework includes a detailed analysis of the entire units of the textbooks. We first analyzed the text of the unit with a focus on genre, content and the hidden curriculum that the content might embody. The second part of the framework is an analysis of the culture of language learning and teaching that these books promote. Current research focuses on revealing the dominant cultural and social ideologies in the literary discourse of secondary school English textbooks in four provinces (Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) in Pakistan.  Analysis is relevant on two levels, content analysis to quantify cultural issues and discourse analysis to validate results and use Byram checklists to gain insight into data. Checklist is used to examine the contents of textbooks and identify their cultural expressions. This survey is qualitative. Narrative research through content analysis theory. The research approach includes a comprehensive analysis of the entire four textbooks units. The results reflect the embodiment of prevailing local ideologies and advocate revision of curricula and educational policies to meet broader educational needs in local and International contexts. Textbooks are the essence of educational policy and play an important role in education. The content of these discourses reflects the country's existing cultural, religious, or social norms and serves as a means for the ruling groups to exercise power. The results show clear differences between the four textbooks in terms of their hidden curricula and the culture of language learning and teaching they represent. This data suggests that English textbooks are more widely read in more foreign cultures than books on her other two cultures, especially native and target languages. This is largely ignored in the textbooks we researched. Therefore, it is suggested that 9^th& 10th grade English textbooks in secondary school need to be improved in order to achieve the goal of intercultural communication competence. The results of this study highlight significant discrepancies in cultural representations in the data. Findings reflect the embodiment of dominant local ideologies and advocate revision of curricula and educational policies to meet broader educational needs in local and international contexts.