Generally, the selection of coursebooks is a demanding issue for teachers because of the responsibility they should take in identifying the authenticity and appropriateness of the material regarding multidimenaional side of language education; therefore, many of the public schools prefer to use the ones published or suggested by Ministry of National Education(MoNE). Because of this tendency in the selection of books published or suggested by MoNE , I would like to analyze English Language Book for 5th graders by MoNE to look for how social justice issues are dealt in this book. In the contents, there are some units that seemingly embody relevant points regarding the social justice phenomenon.
The first unit, “Hello”, is one of parts in which, through the listening activities about countries and nationalities, teacher can give some messages about "respect and equality" like that "we should respect every culture and every nation because we are different but equal. "
Another unit of the book is "Movies". In this unit teacher can prepare short movies which are related to gender, poverty, access to education, etc. Then teacher can ask questions like "What is the topic of the movie?", "Which one is the favourite for you?", "Can you summarize the movie?" etc. So, students should have got ideas about social justice issues in implicit way, and also teacher can acquire information from students' answers about what they know or not about these issues. In this way, students will be able to both linguistic items and a few new ideas about social justice.
The ninth unit of the book is "Animal Shelter". In this part, we can argue with students about animal rights, we can talk about the natural environment of the animals, and also we can prepare shelters for street animals, which travel around the school. In this unit, students will be able to learn animals' names, their natural habitats, their rights; therefore, this topic can be useful to teach that social justice is for every animate creatures.
The last unit of the book is "Festivals". In this unit, we can teach students different religions, different beliefs, different customs and traditions, important days like "Earth Day" all over the world as well as with linguistics items they need to learn. So, they can learn that they should be respectful to different societies and their beliefs.
When we look at the specific details in the book, we can change and vary a few examples like that "Sally is cook." but we must show that "Mike can be a cook." When the teacher provide a few messages about such and such like messages, students can develop their perception on the issues.
In this teaching process, we should use real life objects and authentic materials to teach both linguistics items and current social justice issues. Since the 5th grade students have got concrete thinking system; therefore, we must provide them a meaningful learning environment in both senses, during this process, both teach them foreign language and make them truly beneficial to society and nature by transforming abstract things into concrete. Apart from the fact that students are not accustomed to abstract thinking, these topics of the book are quite suitable to integrate social justice issues into language education, but first of all we should be a role model for our students.