Hidden Neoliberalism in Language Teaching Textbooks

Textbooks have been considered as one of the key leverages to socialization to the extent that they can influence learners’ opinions and tendencies about themselves, other people, and society. English textbooks may affect our students` ideology, attitude, identity, and values. Of notable ideological purposes, we examined neoliberal tenets in Iranian EFL private centers. This concurrent mixed methods research design, adhering to critical discourse analysis and multimodality approaches, explores neoliberal tenets in New Headway Series quantitatively and qualitatively. Our findings revealed tenets such as consumerism, individualism, branding, and profit-making in both texts and images. Implications for EFL teachers and learners are discussed.