Textbooks

The chapter starts by looking at the changing fortunes of disciplinary textbooks as materials for language study and practice in EAP, tracing how genre approaches contributed to giving textbooks a limited but much more specific role as resources for learners and teachers. Genre perspectives have helped practitioners recognize that textbooks may give students an introduction to the basic notions and lexis of their area of study, but will mostly familiarize students with the rhetorical structures of exposition, without presenting a picture of the multiplicity of positions that characterize scholarly argument. Epistemic evaluation, for example, is often said to be limited in textbooks, and attribution plays a minor role. And yet textbooks manage to introduce students to disciplinary ways of arguing, specific approaches, theories, and positions. The nature, function, and structure of textbooks are shown to vary across disciplines, under the influence of what are perceived as traditional steps into the discipline and according to the different roles of interpretative or empirical methods. A wide range of approaches have contributed to a clearer picture of textbook discourse, such as corpus approaches and critical discourse analysis. More recently, contributions have come from multimodal studies, digital discourse analysis, and studies on knowledge communication.