Decolonizing English Language Textbooks

Bringing together diverse perspectives from authors situated in both the South and the Global North, this ground-breaking volume takes a critical, decolonial and global southern approach to exploring colonial epistemologies and pedagogies surrounding textbook discourses and research.

Using a South-North inter-epistemic dialogue, the book challenges conventional notions of undertaking research that includes local ways of knowing and indigenous knowledge. By doing so, the book disrupts colonial ideologies, values and culture, and instead suggests local indigenous frameworks and methodologies for textbook research and epistemology. Contributors engage with various methodologies, such as ethnography, action research, textbook analysis, duo-ethnographies, and interview-based studies informed by various theoretical perspectives including translanguaging, postmethod condition, critical visual literacy, gender decoloniality, critical discourse studies, multimodality, raciolinguistics, decolonial awakening, Afro-centric epistemologies, decolonial interculturality, and pedagogy of becoming. Chapters also uncover how teacher educators, researchers, and textbook writers view, engage and negotiate with these discourses. With chapters originating from across the globe (such as Nigeria, Algeria, Pakistan, Indonesia, Columbia, Brazil, Denmark, Chile, Bangladesh, Morocco, and Greece), the book demonstrates rich geographical and epistemological diversity.

Ultimately providing a wealth of insights for researchers working on decolonization in TESOL/ELT in general and on ELT textbooks and pedagogy in particular, this book will be of use to scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of curriculum studies, teachers and teacher education, and language education.