Religion in ESL Textbooks
Kitty B. Purgason, kitty.purgason@biola.edu
Editors' note: This article is based on a presentation made during the CETC Colloquium at the 2007 TESOL Convention in Seattle, Washington, on "Images of Christianity in the Media." We are grateful to be able to share it with you here.
What might students learn about Christianity in their ESL textbook? How do ESL texts treat religion? These questions were asked in preparation for the TESOL 2007 CETC Colloquium, "Images of Christianity in the Media." I set up a wiki, religioninESLtexts.pbwiki.com (password cetc)¹ , and publicized the project through the caucus Web site and e-list. Participants were instructed that the project was "to document the treatment of religion in general and Christianity in particular in currently used ESL textbooks around the world." They were told to "Look for content related to religion in general and to any specific religion. It could be in print (e.g., a reading about the Dalai Lama or a dialogue in which people talk about their beliefs) or in graphic form (e.g., a photo of a mosque)." Between August 2006 and February 2007 a range of core, grammar, and reading texts were described on the wiki (and I'm very grateful to all who contributed). The books were published by a variety of publishers as long ago as 1985 and as recently as 2006. However, only 26 books were covered. For that reason, I decided not to generalize about numbers or percentages, but rather to use the survey, and my personal review of additional texts on my shelf, to create categories of how religion is dealt with in ESL texts.
Casual References
Some books can be categorized by a casual reference to religion. In some of these, the references are only to Christianity. In one text, a drawing of a city street to elicit sentences with there is/there are includes a picture of a church. In another, a reading about a family's activities to illustrate simple present includes "On Sunday morning they go to church together." An example sentence in a section on prepositions of time in a third text is "Many people go to church on Sundays." In a fourth text, a unit on past tense has students doing an information gap with photos of an Asian couple who "got married at a church." In other books, the references are only to religions other than Christianity. For example, a model paragraph for students writing about an interesting place to travel describes and has a photo of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. There were no references to any other religion in this particular text. The examples I've given can be seen as references to cultural practices and places rather than religious beliefs. However, books that contain such casual references only to one religion may be experienced as biased by some students.
Biblical References
Different from talk of church or mosque, sometimes books contain indirect references to the Bible, of the type that is usually considered cultural literacy. One text includes an Andy Rooney essay on U.S. changes in neighborliness entitled "Love Thy Neighbor" and another text on court cases versus mediation includes a reading on "King Solomon's Decision."
Indirect Acknowledgment
A third category would be an indirect acknowledgment that religion is an element in people's lives. For example, a unit in a workplace ESL book includes a letter stating "in my religion we don't drink alcoholic beverages" and asking for advice about attending a party at a coworker's house.
Touching on Possible Religious Beliefs
Fourth, some books contain elements that touch on what might be included in students' or teachers' religious views without the mention of religion. Prominent among these are readings about superstitions, good-luck charms, palm reading, fortune telling, ghosts, and extrasensory perception. Also in this category are readings about moral and ethical issues. Examples from our small survey included assisted suicide, the pressure on the poor to survive by selling organs, and parents creating an in vitro embryo to harvest cells to save their daughter's life. Such texts might make either the teacher or students feel very uncomfortable or give them a welcome opportunity to discuss important beliefs.
Explicit Coverage of Religion
Fifth, some books include explicit information, usually in reading texts, about religion. One book addresses the topic of "being good." It includes photos of Socrates and Buddha, a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson discrediting religion, and an essay by someone who abandoned the Christianity of his childhood to become a Buddhist. Another text has a reading that describes how a young couple had their new apartment smudged, using a Native American ritual, to get rid of bad spirits. Another text talks about how moving to a new country affects our values, including our religious values, with the example of a Palestinian woman in a headscarf. The only examples we found in this category about Christianity featured what some would consider nonmainstream. For example, the main reading in one book is on the Amish and the example essay in the same chapter is about Mormons. Again, such texts might make the teacher or students, particularly Christians, feel uncomfortable. However, an alert teacher might be able to use such texts to present a more balanced picture of Christianity and invite students of all religious faiths to discuss their beliefs.
No Mention of Religion
A final possibility (quite common among the books surveyed) is that religion is not mentioned at all. Publishers seeking to avoid offense often deliberately choose this option. This kind of blandness might seem desirable in light of the challenges highlighted above. However, although the market forces are powerful in pushing publishers to include or cut certain content, Smith and Carvill (2000) drew attention to the fact that this creates an imbalance in many language-teaching materials. Typical textbooks teach students the language of buying, but not charitable giving. The people students read about are usually drawn from the world of entertainment, not religion of any kind. Smith and Carvill suggested that our materials evaluation should include questions such as "How does the text present the humanity of members of the target culture? Do they fear, doubt, suffer, sin, hope, pray, or celebrate as well as work, shop, play, eat, and drink?" (p. 144).
Conclusion
It is beyond the scope of this brief article to discuss how Christian teachers can respond to texts of all these types in their ESL/EFL classes. I hope that this initial analysis of how our texts deal with religion will prompt consideration of how to do that well. It can also help us in the process of materials evaluation and choice, as well as materials development.
Note
¹ This wiki is still open, if anyone would like to add comments on textbooks or take over the analysis.
Kitty Purgason is chair of the Department of Applied Linguistics and TESOL at Biola University in La Mirada, California. She has taught in Korea, China, Turkey, and Turkmenistan.
Reference
Smith, D. I., & Carvill, B. (2000). The gift of the stranger: Faith, hospitality, and foreign language learning. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
SLW & CALL October 2007 Volume 11 Number 3: Table of Contents
