Neoliberal, trouble-free worlds for an aspirational middle-class in Chinese EFL publications: A multimodal critical discourse analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For most English language learning engagements in expanding circle countries, textbooks play a key role in defining a syllabus and corralling students toward some measure of completion in a course of study. While scholars have shown how English is broadly seen as a prestigious skill, connected with upward socio-economic mobility, less work has been done on the discourses and ideologies carried by the textbooks, even though this is a billion-dollar-a-year industry with titles selling in the millions. Research clearly raises the need for further investigations of the discourses and world views that they carry as they appear in different territories. In this paper, using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, we analyze a corpus of texts books produced domestically within China. In China, English language learning has become a fundamental part of the aspirations of the emerging middle classes, who also tend to consume Western-style products and increasingly take on more individualistic Western-style values. Analysis shows that these textbooks carry language learning activities which combine a gloss of signifiers of more local, cultural ideas embedded in a privileged world inhabited by an aspirational, international middle-class.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".