Ideology and Persian Language Teaching Abroad: Critical Discourse Analysis of Iranian Identity in the Textbook Persian Language Course Based on Van Dijk's Framework (2006)

Textbooks as the most important educational tools underline the reflection and transmission of ideologies. Research literature on the discourse analysis and analysis of ideologies existing in textbooks indicates that the vast majority of these studies are based on English language learning. Taking the progressive development of Persian language teaching into account, the critical situation of Iran in the world and the learners’ wrong attitude towards it, the present study aims to analyze the textbook Persian language course (Meneghini and Orsatti, 2012) in order to achieve the type and the way ideologies were presented, especially in introducing Iranian identity. Accordingly, based on Van Dijk's approach to ideology and the analysis of its dimensions as well as using three key concepts: “Square of ideology”, “group identity schema”, and “strategy of representation ideologies”, two checklists were developed to analyze the selected textbook. The results show that although this textbook tries not to show any bias in contexts and partly to be neutral, through pictures and exercises, deemphasizes the positive point of “us” and emphasizes the negative point of “this group”. Thus, according to the research framework, the attitude of this book towards Iranian identity is biased and its representation is evaluated in conflict with the objectives of language teaching.