---
title: "Who are the non-native speakers of English? A critical discourse — paper by García and Cerezo (2020)"
description: "The paper asks how globally marketed English-teaching textbooks portray people who use English as a second or foreign language. 38 references."
authors: ["Zulma Xiomara Rueda García", "Encarna Atienza Cerezo"]
year: 2020
venue: "Logos: Revista de Lingüística, Literatura y Filosofía 30"
source: "https://revistas.userena.cl/index.php/logos/article/view/1379"
doi: "10.15443/rl3022"
licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Logos: Revista de Lingüística, Literatura y Filosofía)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/garcia-2020-who-non-native-speakers-english/"
---
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# Who are the non-native speakers of English? A critical discourse analysis of global ELT textbooks

**Authors:** Zulma Xiomara Rueda García and Encarna Atienza Cerezo · **Year:** 2020 · **Venue:** Logos: Revista de Lingüística, Literatura y Filosofía 30 · **Licence:** [CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Logos: Revista de Lingüística, Literatura y Filosofía)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.15443/rl3022) · [PDF](https://revistas.userena.cl/index.php/logos/article/download/1379/1365) · [DOI 10.15443/rl3022](https://doi.org/10.15443/rl3022) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3111259294)

**Citations:** 3 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The paper asks how globally marketed English-teaching textbooks portray people who use English as a second or foreign language. The motivation comes from World Englishes, ELF and EIL scholarship, which questions the idea that native-speaker countries "own" English. The authors selected fourteen short texts from two global ELT textbooks. They analysed them with Van Dijk's (2013) sociocognitive approach to Critical Discourse Analysis. Their coding drew on two further sources: the CEFR's categories of sociocultural knowledge and the critical, non-essentialist view of culture from Holliday, Kullman and Hyde (2004).

The textbooks do include non-native characters, apparently to signal multiculturalism. However, they treat these speakers as one broad, undifferentiated group, and diversity mostly appears as a list of nationalities. Characters are typically affluent cosmopolitans, often placed in the US or UK, and others usually describe them instead of letting them speak. The study matters because teaching materials shape which kinds of people learners see as legitimate English users.

## Key points
- The corpus is 14 short texts from two global ELT textbooks. The authors stress that this is a small, non-conclusive sample.
- The analytic grid uses the CEFR sociocultural domains: daily life, living conditions, interpersonal relations, values/beliefs/attitudes, body language, and social conventions and rituals.
- The topic distribution is uneven:
  - Work and leisure lifestyle dominate.
  - English used in education, especially as a contact language, is barely shown.
  - Values, beliefs and relationships are skipped or presented as uniformly harmonious.
- Several dimensions of diversity are absent: sexual orientation, gender, religion and lower-status occupations. Characters are mainly successful professionals, which the authors link to Pennycook's "Myth of English".
- Background figures cited in the paper: about 1.5 billion English users worldwide, of whom roughly 378 million are native speakers. Kachru's inner, outer and expanding circles frame the discussion.

## Interesting ideas
- Using an external, published category list (the CEFR domains) as a fixed coding grid turns a vague question about cultural portrayal into a coverage count per category.
- The authors analyse absences as data, recording which dimensions never appear, not only what is present.
- They check whose voice describes a group: whether characters speak for themselves or are described by a narrator or other characters.
- Reducing people to one attribute (nationality) is identified as flattening.
- The study separates generic group portrayal ("non-natives" as a mass) from individually treated actors.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (world): use the world-model ontology categories as a grid to measure which entity and state types a text collection actually fills, and which stay empty.
- **I2** (learn): when building silver data or test sets, produce an explicit list of missing genres, constructions and frame types, then treat it as a known blind spot in evaluation reports.
- **I3** (frames): record the source of each description (self-report vs third-party attribution) as part of speech-act and reported-speech frames, so answers can say who claims what about whom.
- **I4** (world): entity records should carry several independent attribute slots (occupation, role, location, origin), so that a single label does not become the whole representation of a character.
- **I5** (frames): coreference and frame building should mark generic group mentions differently from specific individuals, so that statements about a class are not attached to a particular entity.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Universitat Pompeu Fabra](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/universitat-pompeu-fabra/) — University, Barcelona, Spain · 36 works · 11,433 citations

Also on the byline: [Universidad Industrial de Santander](https://ror.org/00xc1d948).

📚 Shelves (3): [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 9,296 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 9,206 works · [📚 Literature and Literary Theory](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/literature-and-literary-theory/) · 340 works

🧭 Topics (2): [English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) · 1,373 works · [🧵 Discourse analysis](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/discourse-analysis/) · 394 works

## Cite

Cite as: Zulma Xiomara Rueda García and Encarna Atienza Cerezo. 2020. Who are the non-native speakers of English? A critical discourse analysis of global ELT textbooks. Logos: Revista de Lingüística, Literatura y Filosofía 30.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{garcia2020who,
  title = {{Who are the non-native speakers of English? A critical discourse analysis of global ELT textbooks}},
  author = {Zulma Xiomara Rueda García and Encarna Atienza Cerezo},
  booktitle = {Logos: Revista de Lingüística, Literatura y Filosofía 30},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.15443/rl3022},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.15443/rl3022}
}
```

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## References

38 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 24 October 2026*