Cultural artefacts and nationalism: A comparative multimodal analysis of Indonesian and Vietnamese elementary English textbooks
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Abstract
This study explores how the concept of nationalism is represented through cultural artefacts, which can permeate through different media. The study focuses specifically on English textbooks, which can represent the Source, Target, and International Target cultures (Cortazzi & Jin, 1999) and can take the form of Aesthetic, Sociological, Semantic, and Pragmatic/Sociolinguistic senses (Adaskou et al., 1990), both visually and verbally. Regarding its verbal representation, cultural artefacts can also be manifested within the reading texts with the help of authors’ linguistic choices, which contain an experience of the real world, such as nationalism. This understanding is grounded in Halliday and Matthiessen’s description of the phenomenon as the Ideational metafunction of language. In light of this, the present study investigates, using those three theoretical frameworks, how the concept of nationalism is represented in the English textbooks as seen in the reading texts, and which cultural artefacts are the most salient in representing this concept, both through illustrations and captions. The study is descriptive qualitative in nature, and it employs inductive and deductive content analysis. Elements of quantitative analysis have also been used to record the frequency of occurrences of the selected data in numbers, percentages, and totals. The data for this study were collected from one elementary English textbook used in Indonesia and one used in Vietnam, as per their latest educational curriculum. The study finds that the construction of the reading texts between the Indonesian and Vietnamese textbooks represents different concepts of nationalism, particularly in perceiving education and values that represent the concept of nationalism. The most salient cultural artefacts are predominantly presented through the Source cultures in the Sociological sense, followed by the Semantic sense, and the Aesthetic sense.
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