Imagining Canada, imagining Canadians: National identity in English as a second language textbooks

Abstract

In this study, I establish that language textbooks are sites of discursive struggle through which nationalist imagined communities are reproduced. I use critical discourse analysis to analyze how these textbooks construct Canadian identities that position students in relation to an imagined community of Canada. I analyze twenty-four textbooks and three Citizenship and Immigration Canada publications used in government-funded language instruction in Ontario. Representations of Canada and Canadianness in the texts examined include and exclude student readers, participate in banal nationalism, and legitimate particular understandings of Canada. The identified textbooks mark nationality through flags, maps, references to nation, and the use of nation as a frame of reference. The textbooks also make claims about how 'Canadians' think and behave. This banal nationalism naturalizes and essentializes imaginings of 'Canada' and 'Canadianness' supporting particular and interested constructions and positive evaluations of 'Canadian' identity. Both government produced publications and identified textbooks legitimate constructions of Canadian identity through repeated positive representations of Canadianness; the marginalising inclusions of 'others'; the subordination of gendered, racialised, and classed social positions to nation; and by maintaining a low level of dialogicality overall.