Neoliberal, trouble-free worlds for an aspirational middle-class in Chinese EFL publications: A multimodal critical discourse analysis
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it