Compiling English textbooks is a quite common endeavour among English teaching professionals and the final products are oftentimes counted towards academic achievements and research outputs when the compilers are assessed at the annual performance appraisal or at the time when the compilers apply for promotions. Despite the availability of so many textbooks, how these textbooks are underpinned by particular theoretical or ideological guidelines, end-users such as teachers may not be very clear about how such textbooks are vehicles for transmitting different cultures and ideologies underpinning them. In order to make my point clear, in this presentation, I will report findings from a self-built corpus that has 40 volumes/books of over 100 million words (Liu, 2017; Liu, Zhang & May, 2021; Liu, Zhang, & Yang, 2022; Zhang & Liu, 2022). I will examine the cultural constellations evident in 10 sets of Chinese university English textbooks, comprising a corpus of 864 texts, highlighting how these texts advantage or disadvantage different cultures driven by textbook compilers’ untended ideological influence. As I conclude my presentation, I will be able to make it clear that the dominance of Anglo-American monocultural representation in many English textbooks is problematic in an increasingly multilingual and multicultural world. I will share my thoughts on the implications of these findings for classroom teachers and textbook writers/compilers as my final remarks.
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