THE REPRESENTATION OF MULTICULTURAL VALUES IN INDONESIAN EFL TEXTBOOKS: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Abstract

English textbooks have a role in education for giving knowledge and influence to the students. As portrayed in EFL textbooks, multicultural values are represented to show the identity. This study investigated multicultural values in junior high school EFL textbooks published by the Indonesian Ministry of National Education and Culture. The use of documents to collect the data presented four figures from two EFL textbooks. Following Norman Fairclough's relational dialectic approach to critical discourse analysis (2001), this study examined the stages of description, interpretation, and explanation. For the visual analysis, this study adopted social semiotics and multimodal approaches by Kress and Leeuwen (2006). The findings showed some multicultural values that indicated international culture and local culture, such as 1) traditional food from South Sumatra, 2) music instruments from Sundanese culture, 3) culture depicted in educational policy, and 4) the depiction of American culture. This study implies that teachers and students need to develop classroom activities that increase self-awareness toward multicultural values depicted by the EFL textbooks.

Keywords: critical discourse analysis, English textbooks, multicultural values, self-awareness