A comparative analysis of cultural representations in collegiate world language textbooks (Arabic, French, and German)

Abstract

In world language learning contexts, where learners may have infrequent contact with the target language speakers, learners are primarily exposed to these speakers and their cultures through textbooks. Therefore, the representation of the target language communities and their cultures in textbooks greatly influences language learners’ understanding of these communities. Drawing upon the concepts of imagined communities and identities (Kanno & Norton, 2003) and conducting a multimodal critical discourse analysis (Machin & Mayr, 2012), we analyzed three introductory level world language textbooks (Arabic, French, and German) used at a U.S. university. We examined how the texts imagine language learners and target language communities. Our findings indicate that nation-state ideologies and tourism discourse prevail in how the textbooks imagine language learners and communities, and they fail to represent the complex identities and cultures of language users and learners. We found that these textbooks construct language learners as uncritical and apolitical, and represent language communities as homogeneous and essentialized in which minoritized groups are tokenized or erased. This study contributes to the scholarship in textbook analysis with the critical examination of three collegiate world language textbooks through a comparative analysis of the similarities and differences amongst these textbooks. Based on the findings, our paper presents implications for teaching, including class activities that the authors use to counter the problematic discursive construction in these textbooks.