Still a small World?: critical analysis of <i>cultura</i> in secondary Spanish world language textbooks
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
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.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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