A critical discourse analysis of an international ELT textbook concerning global issues: voices of pre-service ELT teachers

Textbooks have functioned as a linguistic tool and cultural artefact for language educators within diverse socio-cultural contexts. The current study, thus, undertakes a critical discourse analysis of the Navigate textbook series, an internationally employed yet unexamined textbook series. Two series, denoted as B/B +, were deployed at the ELT preparatory programmes of a Turkish state university during the 2021–2022 academic year. The contents of the textbook series were analysed according to the level and pattern of global issues coverage. The opinions of 13 conveniently sampled pre-service ELT teachers were also incorporated to triangulate the data. The codes in the content of the data collection were deductively matched to the pre-set themes: economic, environmental, personal, political and social issues. The findings revealed that the textbooks were brimming with personal issues (43,48%) yet inadequately covered economic (23,91%), environmental (8,70%) and social issues (23,91%) and did not address any political issues. The statistical and superficial coverage was also at the level of knowledge and attitude. However, pre-service ELT teachers favoured a more comprehensive coverage of all-inclusive issues in the textbooks, dominantly more personal issues (46,60%), without excluding political issues. Educational implications were also elaborated for language practitioners, curriculum designers and teacher educators.