March 6

I think that Taylor-Mendes calls attention to something that is very important regarding ESL/EFL textbooks. Since America, the UK, and Canada, as mentioned in the article, have experienced diverse immigration it is interesting that our textbooks do not show this through images. The question What does an American look like? Is answered through the illustrations in the studied textbooks as “white, wealthy, powerful, isolated with members of their own race, and free of problems.” This, I believe, is very sad since a walk down many American large towns and cities will reveal that Americans are very diverse and look very different from one another. This reality is what our nation was founded on and it is a very sad thing that these ideals are not shown through the images projected in textbooks targeted for students who are learning English.

I think that it is interesting that most of the participants (10) in the study were white themselves. Also, the participants came from two of the wealthiest social classes in Brazil (wealthiest 20% of the population). I wonder why the researcher did not try to illicit participation from a mixture of many different people with many types of racial and cultural backgrounds. I wonder how the emerging themes would have differed.

Out of the three themes discussed in the article, I find the third theme “race divided by continent” interesting. After reading some of the quotations from the study I have generalized that this theme means that the images in the textbooks show “aggressively traditional” images of people. Therefore, leading viewers to assume that if you are wearing a certain dress or participating in a certain ritual as described on page 76 of the article you are part of a different culture, from a different continent.

I wish that I could have these textbooks in my hand as I was reading this article. They were all published in the 80s and 90s, and I wonder how images have changed in more recent textbooks. I know that when we adopt new curriculum for our schools, one of the big things we look at are how people are represented in the textbooks. I think that companies as a whole have become more sensitive to this topic since school districts make it a necessity to review what types of racial stereotypes the books are sending. The textbook companies want to make money, so they need to be sensitive to silent messages their products are sending.

The textbook spoke at length about media representations of people of different countries. After I read the textbook, I started paying attention to news broadcasts and how people were represented in what was reported and what was not reported. I found it interesting when I stopped to think about it that all the images of terrorists are based on the first images that are reported to us by news broadcasts. If you asked any American to close their eyes and picture a terrorist they would most often picture an Arab man. (p.199) This is based off of the information coming to Americans through media outlets. No one immediately thinks of the American terrorists who have spread panic through mass bombings or planned attacks. Media has such power over us, it is scary. It makes it more important to teach young people how to think critically about the information they are presented with on a daily basis.