| Beschreibung: |
Adolescents are greatly influenced in their development by educational institutions, where they have to negotiate and come to terms not only with their own identities, but also with those of their peers. The foreign language classroom provides unique possibilities for identity construction using language as a medium to express and reflect identities (Weatherall and Gallois 2003, 489). It presents opportunities for teenagers to negotiate their (social) identities, to position themselves as well as their (cultural) beliefs (Elsner and Lohe 2016). However, foreign language teaching is primarily based on course books, which are involved in ideological practices that establish what is ‘normal’ or ‘acceptable’ in a society (Coates 2013, 537). These 'norms', which are portrayed in the teaching materials, often adhere to the hidden curriculum, thereby promoting the (re-)production of social inequities as well as stereotypical sexual and gender identities. Thus, textbook analysis proves crucial for the disclosure of gender or sexual representations and ideologies. In contrast to previous studies using Critical Discourse Analysis, a queer linguistic perspective drawing upon the key concepts of Critical Discursive Psychology (Wetherell 1998) has been chosen for the purpose of this research project. Critical Discursive Psychology both analyses “psychological topics and concerns in language” (Weatherall 2016, 15) and “draws attention to the productive capacities of discourse showing how it comes to structure both subjective experience and our sense of who we are” (Edley 2011, 191). This presentation introduced a research project on the representations of gender and sexual identities in Austrian EFL upper-secondary textbooks from an applied linguistics' perspective. |