CRITICAL JOURNAL REVIEW

SEMIOTIC

( Culture in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Textbooks: A Semiotic Approach )

Lecturer :
Winda Setiasari, S.S., M.Hum.

Created by :
Name : Sara Claresti Pertiwi
NIM : 2183321010

ENGLISH EDUCATION E 2018

FACULTY OF LANGUAGES AND ARTS
STATE UNIVERSITY OF MEDAN
MEDAN
2020

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 PREFACE

Praise and gratitude to God Almighty, because of His gift I can complete this Critical Journal
Review Task. This assignment is structured on the basis of an assignment namely the CJR Task
of semiotics courses. I don't forget to say a big thank you to Ma'am Winda Setiasari
,S.S,M.Hum., as a semiotica lecturer who has guided me in completing this Critical Journal
Review Task.

This CJR assignment was created to add insight and knowledge to me and the readers. I am
fully aware that in making this assignment is still far from perfect and of course there are still
many shortcomings, for that I really expect criticism and advice from readers and supervisors
who are constructive in order to perfect the next tasks. I hope that this Routine Task can be
useful for writers in particular and for readers.

Medan, 25 Maret 2020

Author

Sara Claresti Pertiwi

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 Table of Contents
PREFACE........................................................................................................................................2

CHAPTER I.....................................................................................................................................4

PRELIMINARY..............................................................................................................................4

A. Rationalizing The Importance of Critical Journal Review...................................................4

B. The Purpose of Writing Critical Journal Review.................................................................5

C. The Benefits of CJR..............................................................................................................5

D. Journal's Identity...................................................................................................................5

CHAPTER II DISCUSSION...........................................................................................................6

A. Discussion.............................................................................................................................6

CHAPTER III CLOSING..............................................................................................................10

A. Conclusion..........................................................................................................................10

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 CHAPTER I

PRELIMINARY

A. Rationalizing The Importance of Critical Journal Review

Rationalization of the importance of Critical Journal Review (CJR) is an activity of
analyzing a journal in order to know and understand what is presented in a journal. Journal
criticism is very important because it can train our ability to analyze and evaluate the discussion
presented by the researcher. So that it becomes a valuable input for other creative writing
process.
Journals have several characteristics, such as limited according to the provisions set by
the organizing organization that contains scientific journals; has the title and name of the author
and the email address and origin of the author's organization; There is an abstract containing a
summary of the contents of the journal, introduction, the methodology used previously and the
proposed methodology, implementation, conclusions and bibliography.

B. The Purpose of Writing Critical Journal Review

Critical Journal Review is made as one of the useful references to increase the insight of
writer and readers is knowing the advantages and disadvantages of a journal, into consideration.
- Review the contents of a journal
- Search for and find out the information in the journal
- Train yourself to think critically in finding information provided by each parts of the journal.

C. The Benefits of CJR

There are 2 benefits of CJR:
- Helps all people in knowing the core of the research results contained in a journal.
- Become an evaluation material in making a journal in the next publication.

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D. Journal's Identity
Title : Culture in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Textbooks: A Semiotic

Approach

Author : CSILLA WENINGER AND TAMAS KISS

Volume: 47

Year's Publication: 2013

Publisher: TESOL QUARTERLY

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 CHAPTER II

DISCUSSION

A. Discussion

The role of culture in foreign or second language teaching has been a delicate issue that
has generated debate in language education for more than half a century. Researchers have
offered different models fordealing with culture in the language classroom, which tend to
reflectnot only educational, but socio- and geopolitical views of the age. In a recent summary of
research in the field, Risager (2011) states that this area of study “has always had a distinctive
interdisciplinary character with multiple theoretical and philosophical positions” (p. 485), which
makes it difficult to summarize or to follow among the multitude of papers a clear line of
academic argument. Yet it is possible to identify certain trends in the research canon that evolved
over the decades.Analyzing the cultural content of language teaching materials is not an easy
task, and thus many different approaches have been applied. Some of these focus on the textual
information (words, reading texts, exercises, etc.), others prefer to draw on both visual and
textual, yet others select only the visual content of the materials as the focus of investigation. As
far as the research methodology is concerned, some apply qualitative whereas others (the
majority of studies) employ quantitative techniques.

One potential shortcoming of current approaches that look at culture primarily in terms of
frequency of content is that they treat culture as an objectifiable component; that is, something
which lends itself to being expressed in numbers. We believe that such treatment is problematic
for two reasons. First, it assumes that meaning is fixed within the text or image and therefore can
be counted. So the image of a double decker bus means British culture. However, counting what
(one thinks) something means or represents may be far away from authorial intention or, more
important, learners’ actual interpretation. Any attempt to deal with “countable” instances of
cultural information or representation is therefore highly inferential. Second, the results of
quantified analyses are often taken as evidence of textbook writers’ (or the state’s, or the
textbook industry’s) ideological stance toward culture. Although we strongly agree that
textbooks as cultural artifacts are laden with ideology, there are multiple factors that shape the
content and design of textbooks, some of which are more mundane than others.

The method of this journal is The analysis draws on two EFL textbooks that were written
by and for nonnative speakers of English in Hungary and which follow different language
teaching approaches. The selection of textbooks was based on the following factors. The target
learners of this jourmal for both textbooks, the target learners are beginner-level secondary
school students. We wanted to make sure that any differences in the age and language level of
the learners would not influence how cultural content is exploited or presented in the materials.
The two textbooks are based on different language teaching principles. One of them adopts a
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communicative syllabus, and the other follows a structural approach to language teaching. Given
that language teaching approach clearly shapes the content, language, and task types of
textbooks, we deemed it best to examine textbooks that are different in this respect, even though
the small sample size prevents us from making far-reaching conclusions.

As stated earlier, the purpose of this article is not to report results from an exhaustive
analysis of cultural meaning in texts and images in the selected textbooks. Rather, our primary
objective is to propose an alternative method of examining cultural potential in textbooks, a
method that is grounded in a semiotic conceptualization of meaning making and that stresses a
dynamic approach to culture. As such, the analysis and examples serve to illustrate particular
conceptual points. Our approach is also fundamentally qualitative, because part of our argument
is that meaning potential is heavily contextual and depend on particular constellations of text,
image, and task. So although we comment on general trends in the textbooks that we scrutinized,
those cannot easily be quantified.

The units of analysis in this study include image(s) and text(s) as well as the
accompanying pedagogic task. This, we emphasize, is crucial, because classroom learning
(which we assume is the predominant context for engagement with the EFL textbook) entails
guided semiosis. Unlike reading a novel, signs and sign complexes in textbooks are typically
accompanied by explicit instructions as to how they should be interpreted. More crucially,
students know and expect that. As a result, visual and textual elements must be examined in
conjunction with tasks aimed at setting them in relation to one another. This has clear
implications for the kinds of meaning and interpretation that may emerge and are likely to do so.

The first claim we propose is that the basic semiotic relationship between text and image
in the textbooks we examined is often indexical: Text and image are related through deictic
contiguity. Let’s look at Example 1 from the textbook Bloggers to illustrate this. The topical
focus of Unit 3, from which Example 1 is taken, is food (the precise title of the unit is
“Yummy”), and this subsection is titled “Eat Smart.” In Activity D, the topic is further narrowed
to “food and drink in your school.” On the right-hand side of the page, there is a photo of a
vending machine and a tray of various food items, and on the left a list of questions students are
expected to discuss and answer in groups.

We have been rather critical of the examples we analyzed, and thus implicitly also of the
textbooks themselves. It is important to acknowledge that this article has not attempted to
provide an evaluation of Bloggers or Steps as foreign language textbooks. The analysis has
mainly concerned the infusion of culture into these teaching materials, with the primary goal of
illustrating how text, image, and task together shape processes of semiosis, including potential
cultural meanings students may infer.

Certainly, both textbooks include segments that have an explicit focus on culture:
passages about famous people of various nationalities, festivals from around the world, and,

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especially in Bloggers, characters and voices from around the world (for instance, the life story
of Maipelo from Botswana, whose mother has AIDS). Although such overt or factual culture
lessons are important, they are not enough, especially because such segments are rarely paired
with tasks that prompt students to reflect. This is linked to the argument made in this article:
Overt cultural content and covert cultural representation (e.g., through images and/or texts) are
overwhelmingly focused on denotation—using text and image solely as a linguistic resource,
leaving cultural connotations unexamined and underutilized. This is perhaps unsurprising if we
take the primary task of EFL to involve the teaching of grammatical and lexical items, with the
occasional cultural content provided in the form of information texts about isolated (and
sometimes seemingly random) cultural practices or figures. Unfortunately, such culture teaching
is likely to merely reinforce stereotypes rather than challenge them (Young, Sachdev,
&Seedhouse, 2009).

Although the analysis and discussion presented in this article have been directed to the
EFL context, the proposed approach to analyzing language teaching textbooks has much wider
purchase and applicability. First, the semiotic principles outlined are applicable to the study of
any print or electronic learning materials provided they use a combination of texts, images, and
tasks in the framework of a pedagogic activity. Second, developing cultural awareness should
not be exclusively the goal of foreign language learning; second language and first language
education must take on a more active role in promoting global cultural awareness, especially in
light of the (inter)cultural ramifications of English as an international language and a global
linguafranca. Thus our arguments for adopting a more dynamic and reflexive approach to
textbook analysis are addressed to a potentially much wider audience of language educators.It is
important to emphasize that a semiotic approach to analyzing cultural meaning potential in
textbooks complements research that examines cultural representations through textual and
visual content present in teaching materials. Though we maintain that how and whether cultural
meaning potential will be taken up cannot be known, studies critiquing biased cultural
representations in textbooks nevertheless draw attention to the fundamentally social and political
nature of teaching English as a foreign, second, or international language and thus expose the
possible role that English language teaching plays in maintaining dominant cultural ideologies.

B. Strength and Weakness

As far as I find in this journal, it can't be weakness.

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In this journal there are many advantages in which the reader is easier to understand in the use of
culture in semiotics. In this journal many opinions of experts about how semiotic in culture and
provide many examples that are easy to understand. The advantages of this journal are also given
examples in the form of images that state it is semiotic.

CHAPTER III

CLOSING

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A. Conclusion
In this article has outline such an approach that draws on basic notions of the semiotic
theory of Charles Sanders Peirce. By introducing semiotic principles in EFL textbook analysis,
we focus on the formal dimensions of the meaning-making process, on how things can mean,
rather than on empirical classroom data from distinct learning contexts. Excerpts from two EFL
textbooks from Hungary are analyzed with regards to the semiotic logic that engenders certain
interpretations. Based on the analysis, we highlight three observations that can be made about
how textbook content, which is potentially a source of cultural learning, becomes meaningful.

In light of recent developments in the social sciences that have questioned monolithic
conceptualizations of culture, this article has argued for a reassessment of how culture in foreign
language textbooks is examined. In addition to approaches that presume a fixed relationship
between text and image and meaning, we have presented a semiotic framework that highlights
the meaning potential that image, text, and task generate in teaching materials. We emphasized
two key points that need to be considered when examining or designing foreign language
textbooks: (1) that the meaning-making process in classrooms is directed (what we called guided
semiosis) and (2) that images and texts (at least in our sample) tend to be linked indexically and
focused primarily on denotation. Our key argument is that such focus on linguistic competence
as opposed to reflexive engagement with cultural information and representation is insufficient if
foreign language learning is to foster intercultural citizenship and a critical understanding of self
and other in a global world.

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