Week Eight Readings

            Cosette Taylor-Mendez summarizes in “Constructions of Racial Stereotypes in ESL Textbooks” a small study that she conducted in Brazil of the impressions textbook images make on the students who study them. Her study investigated the ways in which images were being used in EFL, whose interests were being served by those images, and whether we ought to seek change in such cultural portrayals. Her study, unsurprisingly, found that EFL students perceived a distinct white-dominant culture in the textbooks they were studying. Images of whites in the books presented them as business professionals, successful, wealthy, etc. Images of other races showed them in inferior roles or life situations. Overall, the students in the study thought the books “represented the books as a peaceful land of the social and political elite who are free from problems” (72). Interestingly, all students in the study had visited the US at least once, so they new and could remark on the fact that the images in their books were not showing the US as it really is. One student even commented that the images didn’t “teach about life styles, but about movie-styles” (p 72).

            A great part of the article was at the very end, where Taylor-Mendez offered some practical solutions to the problems highlighted by her study. While acknowledging that most teachers do not have a choice of what textbook they use, she did encourage EFL teachers to take measures to ensure their students recognize the discrepancy between the images in their books and reality. Some suggestions were: conduct thoughtful discussions about the ideas portrayed by the images, engage students in projects that ask them to redesign the images to be more appropriate and realistic, and possibly even have students write letters to the editors of their texts asking them to select more effective images. I love when authors provide practical advice and suggestions.

            The readings in Holliday et. al. provided a great amount of information on a variety of topics. Section A3.2 summarized and provided examples of Otherizing images of different cultures that are presented in the news and other media. Much later in the book, in Secion B3.3, a fascinating article by van Dejh provides more insight on this issue. The author begins by explaining the concept of New Racism, which is a subtler, more politically correct form of racism than the Old Racism of slavery and segregation. Yet, New Racism can in many cases be even more dangerous, especially because it is “respectable” and so widespread. New Racism involves the suggestion that although minorities may not be “inferior”, they are at least “different”: they have a different culture and “deficiencies” such as lack of achievement values and a dependence on welfare.

            The most interesting part of this article was the discussion of the ever-so-subtle ways in which the news media can sort of put minorities in their place while not really appearing to do so. For example, most news stories that involve minorities feature them in negative situations, and news staff will make purposeful lexical choices depending on the race/ethnicity of the subject (e.g. “riot” vs. “urban unrest” or “terrorist” vs. “freedom fighter”). This author also provided the clever use of syntax choices: minorities are often in the passive role in sentences (i.e. the direct or indirect object) unless they are the agents of negative actions, in which case they are the subject of the sentence. This was fascinating data that I had never considered before but immediately realized as true. This type of subliminal messaging has the potential to be eerily effective to even the most open-minded of observers. I wonder how much of these linguistic strategies are done with intent, and how much of it happens more as an unconscious reflex. I was a journalism major in college for three years, and we were (of course) never told to use these strategies, so where do they come from? Do they just grow out of the inherent racism of the writer?