Identity Imposition in EFL Textbooks for Adult Secondary Education in Chile

Abstract

In the midst of recent social movements claiming for free and qualitative education in Chile, this paper presents a study about adult secondary education, one of the sectors that has not benefitted much from the mild reforms generated by such movements. From a critical discourse analysis perspective and using an adapted model that combines textual criteria, pre, intra and posttextual inquiries and a lexico-grammar approach, we scrutinized the textbooks provided by the government to teach English as foreign language (TEFL) in adult secondary education. Considering textbooks as modeling technologies, we found that the portrayals of identity in the EFL textbooks analyzed are decontextualized, biased and irrelevant for the intended audience of adult, working class, dropout students that attend evening lessons in an effort to complete their secondary education. Moreover, in our interpretation, such depictions in these textbooks that are part of the national curriculum in adult education are constructed with an ideological discourse seemingly aimed at maintaining a capitalist status quo and imposing neoliberal identities on learners.