By reporting findings of a multimodal-ethnographic study in a beginner EFL class in Montevideo, Uruguay, this presentation discusses how a locally-adapted EFL textbook is negotiated in the classroom. It shows how students negotiate ‘their own culture’ with the textbook by appropriating and transforming multimodal signs available in it.
There is a growing body of research looking at EFL textbooks and how they discursively construct the notion of culture. However, most studies address this from the perspective of textbook representation only. Textbook discourse can be thought of both text and practice. As text, it provides students with legitimated knowledge, values and cosmogonies (Apple, 1982). Exploring textual representations foreground the structural agency exerted by textbook producers as well as the semiotic negotiations that take place at the level of design (Apple & Christian-Smith, 1991). However, as social practice textbooks are part of wider school and classroom ecologies (van Lier, 2010), which shape how users interact and learn with them. The textbook as social practice requires us to consider how teachers and students negotiate representations according to their own ideological interests and positionings. Analyzing the textbook as social practice, then, foregrounds the situated agency of users in particular environments. Adopting a multimodal ethnographic approach (Kress, 2011; Dicks et al 2011), this presentation reports findings of 8-month observations in a beginner EFL class in Montevideo, Uruguay. The analysis of classroom interaction and work with a locally adapted EFL textbook (Uruguay in Focus) shows how pre-teenage students negotiate ‘their own culture’ (as represented in the textbook) by appropriating and transforming available multimodal signs to signal their disengagement from the cultural elements and practices the textbook depicts as ‘theirs’. The discussion points to the intersubjective negotiation of culture (between students and curricular material) by exploring how the textbook “labeling” of culture hides both out-group similarities and in-group differences (Agar, 1993). Findings also point to students’ agency in interacting and learning with the textbook and in defining how they position themselves culturally and socially by resisting and/or rejecting textbook discourse.
