Abstract
The early Sino-Western contact was through the way in which religion and language interact to produce language contact. However, research on this contact is relatively limited to date, particularly in the realm of English language materials. In fact, there is a paucity of research on Western religions in English Language Teaching (ELT) textbooks. By applying corpus linguistics as a tool and the Critical Discourse Analysis as the theoretical framework, this manuscript critically investigates the significant semantic domains in ten English language textbook series that are officially approved and are widely used in Chinese universities. The findings suggest that various Western religious beliefs, which are the highly unusual topics in previous Chinese ELT textbooks, are represented in the textbook corpus. The results also show that when presenting the views and attitudes toward Western religious beliefs, these textbooks have adopted an eclectic approach to the material selection. Surprisingly, positive semantic prosody surrounding the concept of religion is evident and no consistent negative authorial stance toward religion is captured. Atheism has been assumed to be in the center of Chinese intellectual traditions and the essence of the Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party. Interestingly, the findings from this study provide a new understanding of Chinese foreign language textbooks in the new era, and its addition to the literature on the study of ELT textbooks, as well as its development worldwide.
Highlights
Language and religion share a very long and close history (Sawyer, 2001), though their contact is rarely explored before in China (Spolsky, 2003)
Allen created a Chinese periodical, the Wan-kuo kung-pao (“The Globe Magazine”) (1875–1907), Western Religious Beliefs in English Language Teaching (ELT)-Textbooks and committed to “the extension of knowledge relating to Geography, History, Civilization, Politics, Religion, Science, Art, Industry, and General Progress of Western countries” (Teng and Fairbank, 1954, p. 134)
The discourse analysis of the 10 sets of Chinese universities’ English language textbooks, using corpus-linguistics tools has shown that a variety of words relating to the concept of religion and the supernatural are demonstrated in the textbook corpus
Summary
Language and religion share a very long and close history (Sawyer, 2001), though their contact is rarely explored before in China (Spolsky, 2003). In the early 19th century, missionaries reached China and became the most immediate channel of Western knowledge, as well as the English language. Robert Morrison (1782–1834), a pioneer Protestant missionary, brought out a Chinese version of the Bible, which was later used by the leader of the Taiping Rebellion, and has influenced the early Taiping religious documents. Allen created a Chinese periodical, the Wan-kuo kung-pao (“The Globe Magazine”) (1875–1907), Western Religious Beliefs in ELT-Textbooks and committed to “the extension of knowledge relating to Geography, History, Civilization, Politics, Religion, Science, Art, Industry, and General Progress of Western countries” The acceptance of Western thoughts, Western religions, was very low. This denial of, and rejection to, Western religion can be traced back to as early as the sixteenth century. The early Sino-Western contact was the conflict between the conviction of Confucianism and the ideas of Western religions
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