The paper aims to explore how far English textbooks in Pakistan embody Pakistan and its culture. In this connection, the reading passages and pictures/images of the textbooks taught at secondary level in the government schools of Punjab were analyzed. It was a mixed method study and the specific method employed was content analysis. For this purpose all the reading passages of both the textbooks were firstly categorized and quantified into three categories; Source Culture/s, Other Culture/s and Neutral and then the cultural elements of Source Culture/s were discussed qualitatively using an adapted checklist. The results of the study reveal that the English textbook of class 9 has 12 passages out of which 75% have Source cultural elements, 8.83% have cultural elements of Other Culture/s and 16.66% are Neutral. As far as the English textbook of class 10 is concerned, there are 13 reading passages out of which 23.07% have Source cultural elements, 15.38% have cultural elements of Other Culture/s and 61.53% are Neutral. The findings of the study show that English, being an international language and as a result of globalization, has become compulsory for people belonging to different countries to learn it. However, in order to retain their identity, they try to appropriate English language to underpin their own culture/s through English language used in the textbooks of Pakistan.

The research in hand is a textual analysis of the novel Body Surfing by Anita Shreve which explains the role of language in the construction of an ideology as reality. The aim is to highlight the construction of a certain concept or ideology as a dominant truth claim in society through discourse and how is it blindly followed by all the members without the least strife to change that socalled dominant ideology. Language as a major agent in the construction and perpetuation of an ideology is forever the discourse of those who are in power. This research will propound the discourse active behind the verity of 'oppression' done to women as taken-for-granted and fair. By employing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as research method, the study will critically examine the role of language in legalizing women oppression. We have cultivated the idea of 'women as weak' into something real, that has come to us generation after generation, through language. This supposition provides theoretical underpinnings for the research, which is arrived at through CDA by treating language post-structurally. The literature analyzed highlights the role of language in the process of meaning-making by considering it to convey reality. The various words and phrases from the extracts in hand with contextual and conceptual affiliation, are dealt with under the backdrop of Fairclough's (1992) Three Dimensional Model of CDA, which results in the recognition of oppression thought as legitimate by the ultimate use of language. The analysis done under the backdrop of poststructuralism will show that language is not the depiction of maximum reality rather; it is we, the users of language, who make it real by considering some concepts as truth and others as myth. The paper concludes that the opposite gender is actually oppressed and that this oppression is not given, rather the constructed one. CDA challenges this oppression and declares it the work of language only. It (language) has no signs of reality, subsistence or truth.

This study investigates the syntactic structures of spoken discourse of teachers in academic discourse. The knowledge of syntactic structure of a language helps in understanding the spoken discourse. So, the study identifies the wh-Movement in the syntactic structures of teachers in English classroom sessions. The data was collected from two universities of Federal government, Pakistan. The one was Air University Islamabad and the second was National University of Modern Languages Islamabad. The data was collected through the recording tool where the English classroom sessions of the teachers were audio-recorded and transcribed. The analysis of data was quantitative and qualitative in nature. The frequency of wh-movement in the structures of recorded English spoken data was analysed quantitatively. In qualitative analyses, the transcribed data was analysed syntactically, keeping in view minimalist perspective, with the help of parsing rules and figures. The analyzed data shows that the teachers at undergraduate level use language where wh-movement is employed in syntactic structure of English used in classroom sessions. They move whexpression into other slots like internal merge and pied-pipe. However, the minimalist parametric unit, wh-movement, was found in the sentence structures of the teachers in the delivery of classroom sessions. So, the minimal pairs of sentence structure impacts different level of language.

The language used in academic texts and pedagogy is referred as academic discourse. Being student and teacher, the researchers observed that mixing of home language with academic language was a common practice in many institutions. Some linguists appreciate it, while others resist it by claiming it detrimental to objectivity and neutrality. Chiang (2006) finds role of teacher’s discourse a determining factor in pedagogy. Current study was conducted to observe the phenomenon of hybridization in academic discourse and to assess it in the light of pragmatics. Pragmatic analysis is known as a useful method to infer covert and implicit meanings of language (Savignon, 2007) and the researchers deemed it appropriate for current research. The pragmatic analysis could provide a newer outlook on academic discourse. Data was collected through observation sheet from the classes. Questionnaire was also used to get relevant data from teachers. The findings revealed that teachers often relied on cultural and ideological underpinnings in their pedagogy. The individual conversational styles were also responsible for different mode of hybridization and subsequently reinforced diverse facet of discourse different in pragmatic nature. The data was first analyzed for hybridization followed by its pragmatic analysis. The study was important in the backdrop of one of many beliefs, that meaning never remains fixed and it resides in socio-cultural structures and lack of pragmatic knowledge among interlocutors impedes semantic proficiency. The study revealed utility of pragmatic competence in turning this mixing of discourses in a class into a continuum. It also found that knowledge of academic pragmatics could reinforce semantic proficiency.

This research paper foregrounds the postcolonial representation of women in Hyder's River of Fire. The novel covers a large span of history. In the entire novel, the female writer presents a lot of women in the backdrop of socio-political and historical backdrop. The western totalizing and Universalist discourses of feminism do not explain well the scope of representation of women in this novel. Even third-world feminism does not suffice here. The research shows that the novelist consciously writes back the colonial and postcolonial feminist representation of women. The analysis highlights that the question of marginalization and subjugation must be seen with multiple factors such as history, society, culture and class. The novel presents multiple identities of women in the historical flux of more than two thousand years.

The present study, grounded in the qualitative research paradigm, is an interpretive and explanatory analysis of Toni Morrison's fiction from the critical perspective of post structuralist feminist literary theory and fiction. In my reading of Toni Morrison's fiction as the manifestation/materialization of the knowledge in terms of discursive (re)configuration of women and to analyze their works from "feminine sentence" perspective, I have used Feminist poststructuralist theories in the discourse-theoretical/methodological background. As part of the methodology, this project draws extensively upon feminist theories, particularly those propounded by French Feminists Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva, which I have used in the backdrop of discourse analysis methods proposed by Michel Foucault. This fusion of Feminist theories as a theoretical framework and discourse analysis as a methodology has illuminated systematically the process of the discursive formation, dissemination, and institutionalization of the knowledge about women. For my analysis of the discourse spectrum of the texts-to-be-analyzed, I have used extensively Foucault's notions about discourse and knowledge as discussed comprehensively in his books, articles, and interviews.

Political discourse is inarguably deemed an essential tool, impercetably influencing people’s perception within a socio-political zone. The present research revolve around the critical discourse analysis of manifestos of Pakistani political parties, pertaining to the general election of 2013. The theoretical framework for the study triangulates VanDijks (1998) Socio-Cognitive Model, along with the support of Turner and Tajfels (1979) Social identity approach and Budge and Farlies Salience theory (1983). The research revealed that all the political parties under study used the discursive strategies in their party manifestos in order to enhance the positive self-image of party to in-group people, by focusing the negative aspects of the out-group, thereby (re)constructing peoples political identities and ideologies and achieving the desired hegemony for itself.

Journey Metaphors are among the most pervasive source domains used both in daily life and in political discourse as they follow a clearcut source-path-goal schema where the direction is a fundamental element. The crossdomain mapping between source and target domains is a means of gaining insight into the cognitive activity of the speaker. Metaphors of the journey are widely used in the political discourse generated by Imran Khan with special emphasis upon direction. Metaphorical expressions identified from speeches of Imran in both English and Urdu language have been analyzed using the Critical Metaphor Analysis approach given by Charteris-Black (2005) where linguistic metaphors have been interpreted semantically, pragmatically and in cognition to generate conceptual metaphors. Khan’s obsession with direction activates the PAKISTAN IS OFF TRACK conceptual metaphor necessitating a journey of change under his leadership. He highlights the failures of others to evoke images of a destructive past from which freedom becomes essential.

English fiction pertaining to the British rule in India marked Indian Muslims intovisibility through the portrayal of their stable stereotypical identity, and since its publication, A Passage to India has gained the status of authentic imagining of Muslims asconservative religious ‘Other’ of the West. As such, they are analyzing this text as an instance ofcolonial fixity necessitates the identification and consideration of those discursive strategies used bythe text for the projection of abrasive Muslim images. The focus of this paper is to critically approachA Passage to India through the application of Fairclough’s threedimensional model so as to validate the claim of stereotypicalrepresentation of Muslims in India during colonial rule. Largely amatter of despotic manipulation within the text, the narrator doteson the anecdotal treatment of Muslim characters with a purpose tojustify. By adhering to colonial discursive binarism, this noveldepicts colonized Muslims as dehumanized and caricatured othersin essentialist terms by shelving their political, historical andcontextual identification.

The present critical discourse study explores the discursive construction of immigrant identity of Mohajir/Urdu Speaking people in Pakistan through the analysis of an autobiographic discourse in the form of My Lifes Journey by Altaf Hussain. Discourse Historical Approach of CDA serves as the theoretical and analytical framework for this study. This framework is based on themes and discursive strategies. The analysis of the selected discourse reveals that the interview based autobiography of the political figure is based on the recurring theme of political transformation and reconstruction of immigrant identity. The discourse is also constituted of several discursive strategies; the most prevalent ones are those of victimization, topos of history, topos of definition and positive self and negative other presentation. The autobiographical discourse highlights the transformational phases the immigrant identity of Mohajirs has gone through. The readers of this discourse under analysis often encounter terms like parochial difference, biased attitudes, and discrimination.