Ideologies of monoculturalism in Confucius Institute textbooks: A corpus‑based critical analysis

For the past two decades or so, the world has witnessed the global craze of learning Chinese as foreign language and the mushrooming of Confucius Institutes through the efforts of promotion of the Chinese government. By the end of 2010, there have been more than 690 Confucius Institutes/Schools established in 96 countries/regions, most of which are with English as a dominant language. There is a growing concern and critique about the Chinese ideology and culture emerged with this rapid expansion may affect the world view of non-Chinese speakers. This study thus attempts to examine the issue from a perspective of corpus-based critical discourse analysis of Chinese textbook materials used in Confucius Institutes. The analysis will look at how the ideology and culture embedded in the reading materials have been reflected in the Chinese textbooks commonly used in Confucius Institutes around the world, and what culture images they have been projected to the learners. We will firstly build a corpus of reading texts to collect a dozen of Chinese textbooks widely used in those Confucius Institutes. Following on corpus annotation and content analysis, we hope our findings can capture the patterns of language use and cultural images identified and distributed in the texts. We believe that the selected teaching materials in the textbooks reflects an ideology that serves the interests of particular groups in society to the exclusion of others, and thus contributes a lot to the attitude of the learners towards the ideology and culture carried by the language itself.