Sustainable Discourse Representations of English in Islamic Educational Journals: Critical Development of Academically and Functionally Meaningful Values

Abstract

The empowerment of Islamic education conducted through knowledge production and published periodically by Islamic educational publishers unconsciously increased the dominant discourse of English discursive representations in some Islamic higher educational journals. Academical-functional clashes of interlanguage use seemed to be common phenomena because they were packaged virtually by sophisticated digital technology through open access journal system. These issues remained the critical questions and demanding reflections. This study was aimed at analyzing the dominant representational discursive relations focusing particularly on the major elements of representational discursive modes of English language in open access Islamic educational journals, appraising social-functional connecting discursive modes and the related negative impacts of English dominances in institutional, situational, and social domains, and recommending alternative critical reflections for the sustainable development of scientific discourse in Islamic educational knowledge contexts. This study used critical discourse analysis, supported analytically by the perspective of systemic functional linguistic–particularly on mood systems and reflectively mediated by the perspectives of Islamic concepts. The results showed that the academical-functional discursive representations of open access Islamic educational journals dominated by high frequency of verbal operators with high modes volume. Such representational discursive domination might impact on creating unfairness of institutional-standardized domain, financial-situated domain, and language use in social domain for authors as well as public readers–with diverse cultural backgrounds–and the sustainable development of scientific discourse in Islamic educational knowledge context. Such dominant discursive representations should be alternatively reflected by critical discursive reflections: mediated through Islamic educational concepts, i.e. tarbiyah (educating, empowering, and developing) and tanwir (enlightening, educating, and innovating), and then moderated by cross-culture Islamic communication, i.e. adil (fairness and equality), amanah (reliable, accountable and responsible), wasathiyah (moderation and neutrality), and siddik

(reasonable and rational/proportional). Hopefully, this research outcomes might contribute to compensate the proportional limits of representational foreign discourse dominated by high frequency and volume of representational modes of English language that might implicate unfairly on the future balancing and equality of academically and functionally meaningful values on Islamic educational knowledge developments through open access scientific publications.