Hidden Ideologies in English for Iraq Textbooks: A Critical Discourse and Multimodal Analysis of Health, Education, Culture, Safety, and Environmental Awareness

Abstract

         English language textbooks have evolved from language learning tools to educational texts that convey cultural values, social norms, and ideological views. This study explores how five major educational topics are represented in the English for Iraq textbook series for intermediate and preparatory levels. The topics are: health awareness, educational values, cultural diversity, environmental responsibility and safety awareness. Research Design The study is qualitative interpretive design. The study adopts the Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MCDA) for the analysis of textual and visual discourse. The results show that the textbooks consistently emphasize individual responsibility and, to a limited extent, institutional accountability and broader social contexts. The analysis further indicates that representations of health, safety and environmental issues are more likely to emphasize individual behavior than systemic factors, while cultural diversity is depicted. The analysis shows that health, safety and environmental issues are often represented in ways that emphasize individual behavior over systemic factors, and that cultural diversity is presented through lenses that only partly reflect local cultural and religious identities. This study illustrates how linguistic and visual resources combine to construct implicit ideological meanings that shape learners’ perceptions of society and citizenship. The findings contribute to Critical Discourse Analysis research in the field of English language education and have practical implications for curriculum developers, textbook authors and EFL teachers by advocating Critical Language Awareness (CLA) and facilitating the development of more balanced, inclusive and critically informed instructional materials.