Dealing with anxiety

Discourses on anxiety in a new high school english language textbook

Abstract

The objective of this study is to analyze speeches about anxiety in an English language textbook for the new high school. The theoretical apparatus that guides the reflections is anchored in Michel Foucault's notes, especially the concepts of discourse, utterance, discursive practice, truth, modes of objectification and subjectivation, as well as authors who discuss the problem of anxiety disorder, such as such as the DSM-V (2014). The corpus of analysis is made up of a high school English textbook, English vibes for Brazilian learnes, more specifically the unit called Dealing with anxiety, whose focus lies on starting from the theme of anxiety, especially among young people, to work on skills teaching English as a foreign language. Methodologically, this work is characterized as a documentary research, of a qualitative nature. The analyzes show that the selection of anxiety as a theme for a unit of the studied didactic material is sensitively articulated with the amplitude of this problem on a global scale. Furthermore, it was possible to verify that the position enunciated in the textbook, in addition to bringing discursive materialities marked by the emphasis on information about anxiety, center technologies of the self, through which the student subject can subjectify himself.