(Re)Searching culture in foreign language textbooks, or the politics of hide and seek

Abstract

ABSTRACTTextbooks are curriculum artefacts that embody particular ideologies and legitimise specific types of knowledge [Apple, M. W. (1982). Education and power. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Apple, M. W., & Christian-Smith, L. K. (1991). The politics of the textbook. In M. W. Apple & L. K. Christian-Smith (Eds.), The politics of the textbook (pp. 1–21). London, NY: Routledge]. As the general public tends to associate them with truth rather than opinion [Meyer, C. J., & Rosenblatt, P. C. (1987). Feminist analysis of family textbooks. Journal of Family Issues, 8(2), 247–252. Retrieved from: http://jfi.sagepub.com/], textbooks can contribute to the circulation of particular representations and stereotypes. In the past decades, there has been an increasing interest in analysing the ways in which textbooks (re)produce representations of history, ethnic groups, minorities and gender differences, to name a few. Foreign language research has focused on the representation of foreign and native culture(s), given that this term has been central in debates in the areas of second and foreign language theories [Weninger, C., & Kiss, T. (2013). Culture in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks: A semiotic approach. TESOL Quarterly, 47(4), 694–716. Retrieved from http://www.tesol.org/read-and-publish/journals/tesol-quarterly]. Using a qualitative synthesis research approach, this paper analyses a pool of studies on the representation of culture in foreign language textbooks to answer a main question: How do language textbooks represent foreign culture? Findings will contribute to understanding how textbook discourse favours some representations of culture and why it does so. In turn, they may also inform teaching and learning practices, such as the actual use of language textbooks in the classroom, in which teachers’ and students’ agency is undeniable.