Exploring Social Class, Gender, and Ethnic Identity in the Vision 3 Conversations: A CDA Perspective

Sociological and cultural aspects of textbook contents are of critical significance to the ELT community in terms of research and practice. Due to textbooks’ unique role in the success and effectiveness of language education programs, and since textbooks function as key providers of learners’ input, representations and depictions of people from different social groups, cultures, and ethnicities in textbooks would impact learners’ processes of understanding, development, and internalization of appropriate communicative and context-specific language use. Principles of unbiasedness, fairness, equality, diversity, inclusiveness, and impartiality in presence and representation of different social and cultural groups are not only important for conflict avoidance but also for ensuring high-quality language education. This study aimed to conduct critical discourse analysis to investigate representations of social class, gender, and ethnic identity in conversations of the Vision 3 textbook. Thus, Fairclough’s three dimensional model was employed to explore and categorize the contents of the six conversations in the textbook within the scope of the study. The analysis demonstrated the implied presence of characters from the urban middle class, substantial predominance of male characters, and absence of any trace of Iranian local or minority ethnicities’ ethnic identity in the contents of textbooks’ instructional conversations. Analysis of the contents of other parts and sections of this textbook, along with the other two textbooks in the series with different CDA models and a broader scope of sociocultural, anthropological, ethnological, and semiotic focuses and approaches, can enhance understanding of, and generate deeper insight into various aspects of the Vision series.