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The cultural sustainability in English as foreign language textbooks: Investigating the cultural representations in English language textbooks in China for senior middle school students

Paper · 2022 · Jun Lu, Yanhong Liu, Lin An et al.

Summary

The paper asks whether English textbooks used in Chinese senior high schools help sustain learners' own culture or mostly carry foreign, chiefly Anglophone, content. The authors take two widely used textbook series, NSEC and a series titled English, and apply content analysis to their texts. They sort each text by the culture it refers to, using categories based on Kachru's three circles of English: inner, outer and expanding. They add two more categories: Chinese culture, and common or unspecified culture. The analysis draws on two frameworks, cultural sustainability and world Englishes.

Both series turn out to be lopsided. BANA cultures (Britain, Australasia, North America) dominate. Chinese culture gets comparatively little space, and outer-circle cultures barely appear. The authors argue that this matters because textbooks are the main channel of EFL instruction in China, the country with the most EFL learners. A skewed mix may weaken students' cultural identity and lead them to rank cultures instead of valuing diversity. They recommend that textbook writers and education policy aim for a more balanced mix.

Key points

  • The corpus is two senior-high EFL textbook series used in China, NSEC and English, examined with content analysis of their texts.
  • Texts are coded by Kachru's circles (inner, outer, expanding), plus Chinese culture and common/unspecified culture.
  • Outer-circle cultures appear in only two texts in each series. Expanding-circle cultures other than China make up about 8–9% in both series.
  • Common or unspecified culture accounts for 21% of the English series and 26% of NSEC. Texts that compare several countries' cultures are scarce.
  • The findings agree with earlier work (Liu et al., 2022a): in 10 sets of Chinese university English textbooks, Chinese culture made up only 3% of cultural content. The study was funded by Hebei Philosophy and Social Sciences Fund HB21YY002.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The authors audit a teaching corpus by labelling every text with a coarse origin category and comparing the shares, which turns a vague worry about bias into a measurable distribution.
  • I2. The scheme includes an explicit "common/unspecified" bucket instead of forcing every text into a named culture, which keeps the coding honest and shows how much content is culturally neutral.
  • I3. The categories come from an established framework, Kachru's circles, rather than ad hoc labels, so results can be compared across studies and countries.
  • I4. Following Kramsch, the paper treats a learner's own culture (C1) and the target culture (C2) as both necessary, because understanding grows from contrasting the two.
  • I5. Textbooks are treated as carriers of values and not just of grammar and vocabulary, so their content selection is analysed as a design decision with consequences.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): We could tag our silver data and test sets by source, genre and cultural setting, then report category shares next to scores, so a model tuned on one slice is not presented as general.
  • I2 (world): When we attach entities and events to places or cultures in the world of a text, an explicit "unspecified" value would be better than guessing a default (often American) setting.
  • I3 (world): Country and culture attributes in our ontology could be grouped through stable external taxonomies drawn from Wikidata properties, so that comparisons of corpus composition stay consistent across runs.
  • I4 (answer): School-course reading tests could include matched passage pairs set in different cultural contexts, checking that the reader's answers do not depend on familiar Anglophone scenarios.
  • I5 (answer): The fables and tales we use for QA should be chosen and documented deliberately, with a short note on their origins, so the evaluation set itself can be explained.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Shanghai International Studies University · Yanshan University.

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Jun Lu, Yanhong Liu, Lin An and Ying Zhang. 2022. The cultural sustainability in English as foreign language textbooks: Investigating the cultural representations in English language textbooks in China for senior middle school students. Frontiers in Psychology 13.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.944381

@inproceedings{lu2022cultural,
  title = {{The cultural sustainability in English as foreign language textbooks: Investigating the cultural representations in English language textbooks in China for senior middle school students}},
  author = {Jun Lu, Yanhong Liu, Lin An and Ying Zhang},
  booktitle = {Frontiers in Psychology 13},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.3389/fpsyg.2022.944381},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.944381}
}

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