The Critical Study of American English File Book

The present research deals with critical discourse analysis of "American English File" book. The purpose of this study was to examine discoursal factors, ideological and cultural attitudes and the way of their representations in the mentioned book. For this purpose, it has selected two texts of the book and some pictures. Discursive structures of these two texts have been investigated according to van Dijk (1998) framework. Also Kress and van leeuwen (1996) theory is used for analyzing of pictures. The results show that the book is full of discoursal factors such as lexical items, syntactic, semantic and functional structures as well as social components such as situational context, participants, social structures, power and the cognitive components of mental and context models, values, attitude systems and socio – cultural knowledge.
The authors have arranged the discourse of this book by these discursive, social and cognitive components in the form of discursive structures in such a way that contains their purposes and ideologies such as description and study of social issues in western societies. It also represents national Knowledge and cultural Knowledge with representation of capitalist system and racism attitude. As a whole, the soft transition of West social and cultural values in this book has been represented.