A Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis of the Frequency and Co-occurrences of Danmark and Europa in Textbooks for Danish as a Foreign Language

Abstract

The understanding of the concepts of ‘the national’ and ‘the European’ as possible aspects of identities is commonly and frequently discussed in many interdisciplinary ways. Most of the existing approaches that address how identity is built indicate that mass media are involved in constructing and disseminating such concepts, because they convey the public discourses about national and European identities. Educational media are part of this mass media discourse. They reflect and perpetuate concepts of ‘the national’ and ‘the European’. In particular, textbooks for teaching foreign languages include aspects of constructs of national identities as part of the intercultural educational context of the language being taught. This article presents an investigation of how concepts—as linguistically bound knowledge—of ‘the Danish’ and ‘the European’ are constructed through language use, and presented in textbooks on Danish as a foreign language and in the curriculum for Danish as a school subject in Schleswig-Holstein. We focus particularly on identifying constructions that reflect the specific relationships between Denmark, Germany, and Europe, especially the European Union, and constructions that refer to the concepts of size and political power as potential elements of national and European identities.