Still a small World?: critical analysis of cultura in secondary Spanish world language textbooks

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ABSTRACT This critical teacher action research study revisits previous findings that high school Spanish textbooks tend to reflect small and invented worlds, rely on cultural stereotypes, and fail to engage students in critical thinking about sociocultural issues. Using multimodal SFL-based critical discourse analysis, we explore more recent textbooks used in the United States, with a focus on how they construe meanings regarding Spanish speakers, cultures, and linguistic/cultural dominance; and how they position and engage students relative to Spanish language varieties and cultures. Findings from an analysis of 24 textbook passages demonstrate that the focal textbook series linguistically and visually backgrounds Spanish speakers, particularly Black and Indigenous members of Spanish-speaking communities, as contributors to culture and construct membership in a nation-state as the most salient aspect of their cultural identities. Moreover, the textbooks position and engage students as elite bilingual tourists and cultural consumers. We discuss how these semiotic choices reproduce deficit raciolinguistic ideologies around Spanish speakers and cultures in the U.S. context, which has implications for world language teachers wishing to challenge these ideologies and simultaneously support students’ development of language and critical literacies.