Linguistic Features Constructing Notions of Peace: A Descriptive Study of English and Filipino Language Textbooks

Language is one of the critical aspects of school textbooks, as it may lend itself to either a pro-peace or a pro-violence treatment. As the primary media of school textbooks, languages possess distinct features that may be used as powerful and effective tools in the construction and conveyance of universal and community-specific values such as peace. Exploring the features of language can help clarify its critical role in constructing and promoting peace. However, there is a dearth of studies on linguistic features and how they construct certain notions of peace. Hence, the present qualitative study explores the morphological, syntactic and semantic features of English and Filipino used by textbook writers, as well as the notions of peace constructed by these linguistic features in language textbooks. The study employs Gee’s (2011) Discourse Analysis, with corpus coding as the primary approach in analysing eight junior high school English and Filipino language textbooks. In-depth analyses of lexical data reveal that morphological (e.g., compound words, the suffix -ation and negative prefixes), syntactic (e.g., lexical categories, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, as well as phrases such as noun phrases, verb phrases, adjective phrases and adverb phrases) and semantic (e.g., synonyms, antonyms and metaphors) features of English and Filipino are employed by textbook writers to discursively construct notions of peace. Among the various notions of peace in language textbooks, self-respect, respect for others, social responsibility and justice are the most prevalent.