COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF GRADE 7 ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEXTBOOKS OF INDONESIA, PHILIPPINES, AND LAO PDR: TOWARD ASEAN INTEGRATION
The ASEAN Socio-cultural community ensures a blueprint for concrete actions to be undertaken to promote the establishment of ASEAN socio-cultural community. Textbook as instructional material, have a vital and positive role on the campaign for mutual understanding and respect. Hence, all national commissions initiate a reciprocal comparative analysis of textbooks to revise biased and flawed texts which would help avoid misunderstandings of other countries in the future. This qualitative analysis was conducted to analyze the content of the three ASEAN countries' textbooks on the themes of One's Self in Relation to Others, Family as the Basic Structure of Society, and One's Culture in Relation to Others. To find out the dominant codes, discursive practices and their comparison of the discursive practices among the three countries, and the dominant word view among these texts books, the researcher made use of content analysis anchored on Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis. The corpora used in this study were the English language textbooks of Indonesia and the Philippines. The themes in the language textbooks were pre-determined through the initial reading of the text. A line-by- line analysis of the text was done to find the frequency count of each code. The codes were interpreted vis-a- vis the various factors that impinge on textbook production and its social practices. The findings revealed that the textbooks predominantly discussed the country’s respective cultures but have minimal discussion of the culture of other ASEAN countries. Moreover, the citizens in these countries shared similar cyclical philosophy about life. Gender inequality, colonial mentality, and the extended kinship were the dominant themes. The difference between the three textbooks lies on the content words which were found prominent. These words are about religion, holiday, and social institutions. In line with the findings, a framework on textbook production and revision was recommended to contribute in the ASEAN educational integration through Intercultural Communicative Language Teaching strategies.