A critical analysis on English textbooks and literature as an alternative resource for decolonial education

Abstract

English Textbooks are commonly geared toward learning content for communicative purposes and skills development and they do not always explicitly and critically bring to the scene ideological issues that favor a decolonial view (MALDONADOTORRES, 2019; MIGNOLO, 2018; OLIVEIRA, 2019; WALSH, 2018) of English teaching and have its ideological character in perspective (RAJAGOPALAN, 2004). These questions surreptitiously participate in the composition of unique stories (ADICHIE, 2009), which act in the construction of concepts and prejudices conveyed in them. In this construction, discursive textures are found alongside a rhetoric of absence – conceived from the notion of “forms of silence” (ORLANDI, 2007) –, which sometimes reinforce stereotypes, engendered through the predominance of a hegemonic view, sometimes promote the erasure of cultural aspects that would put into play the thriving ethnic-racial and socio-cultural diversity in times of border problematization and paradigm de-hierarchization. Based on the assumptions of Critical Discourse Analysis (MELO, 2018; VAN DIJK) and Critical Applied Linguistics (PENNYCOOK, 2006; MOITA LOPES, 2006), this paper aims to present a critical analysis of two textbooks for teaching English as a foreign language. Combined with this analysis, this study presents alternatives for the development of critical thinking (HOOKS, 2010) in the teaching of English through the use of literary texts (BRUN, 2004; MOTA, 2010; PEREIRA, 2017) of postcolonial contexts with the purpose of deconstructing a rhetoric of knowledge production of unilateral diction and hegemonic matrix in a perspective that strives for decoloniality (MALDONADO-TORRES, 2019; MIGNOLO, 2018; OLIVEIRA, 2019; WALSH, 2018).