Culture plays an integral role in English language teaching (ELT) and is the reading components of ELT textbooks. This study explores the issue of cultural representation in ELT textbooks in India, which has received little attention in ELT research world-wide. By incorporating 10 ELT textbooks from four states, one national board from India, and a sequential mixed-method design, this research is aimed at investigating the cultural representation of the textbook content, characteristics of people in terms of race, gender and nationality, and the depth of the cultural content. While the results have revealed a general domination of cultural representations originating from Britain, including a major proportion of British, Irish, and generally White characters, a significant amount of gender bias, and overall minimal in-depth cultural engagement, there exists wide regional variations. Language teachers may adapt cultural representations that are relevant with other pedagogical resources to engage English language learners in critical pursuits.
Family language policy (FLP) is increasingly recognised as a distinct domain of language policy concerned with the family as an arena of language policy formulation and implementation. While FLP is a relatively new research area, its conceptualisation of family and language practice requires re-examination due to social changes and technological developments, including the expansion of digital communication within families and the rise of globally dispersed families a product of global migration and transnationalism. In this systematic review of migrant FLP research, we investigate how the notions of family and language practice are conceptualised in research. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, we identified a total of 163 articles for analysis. Our analysis reveals that the majority of studies were conducted in nuclear families, i.e., those consisting of a father, a mother, and one or more children. Studies also tend to conceptualise the family as fixed and physically located in one place. Paradoxically, around half of the studies acknowledge the presence of geographically dispersed family relations, but this does not necessarily affect their conceptualisation of what comprises a family. Language practice was conceptualised as physical and face-to-face communication in 51% of instances, with only 11% incorporating an analysis of digital communications. Based on our review, we recommend that FLP researchers researching migrant families reconceptualise the family as geographically dispersed and language practice as digital and multimodal when necessary. Such a reconceptualisation will help researchers understand the hitherto underexamined contributions of dispersed family members and multimodal digital communications in migrant FLP.
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