Infusing moral education into English language teaching: an ontogenetic analysis of social values in EFL textbooks in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the representation of social values and their ontogenetic development in English as a foreign language textbooks in Hong Kong. Adopting a social semiotic approach, it considers social values in textbooks as semantic categories which are constructed by complex semiotic discursive resources, and develops an explicit framework to model what values are selected and how the values are constructed. Analysis of 19 textbooks from Primary 1 to Secondary 4–6 shows that the social values change from the personal domain (e.g. good hygiene and healthy lifestyle), through the interpersonal domain (e.g. politeness and respect), to the altruistic concern for all mankind. The result also suggests that the textbooks are more concerned with the didactic education of good citizens than with cultivating children’s critical thinking. The analytical framework and the findings can be used for the explicit instruction and critical analysis of social values in English language teaching.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral education
• social values
• EFL textbooks
• multimodal construction
• ontogenetic development
• Hong Kong

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dr Malcolm MacDonald and the two anonymous reviewers for their critical and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The spelling of ‘Judgement’ is used when referring to the terminology in Martin and White (2005), and ‘judgment’ is used in other cases.

Additional information

Funding

The study is supported by Dean’s Reserve, Faculty of Humanities, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (project No. 1-ZVCA).