Dear colleagues, 

You are warmly invited to the forthcoming talk at the UCL Institute of Education: 

                                            Representations of the world in language textbooks

Professor Karen Risager, Roskilde University

Department of Communication and Arts. Cultural Encounters/Intercultural Studies

17.00-18.30, Monday 4 June, 2018,

Room 822, UCL Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL

Writers and editors of language textbooks and other learning materials construct – directly or indirectly – representations of culture and society while they are developing activities aiming at language learning. These representations are not theoretically neutral. All representations of culture and society can be related to one or more theoretical perspectives that may draw on very different theoretical and epistemological traditions.

I am going to present five theoretical perspectives that are widely known in the field of research on culture and society: National studies, citizenship education studies, Cultural studies, postcolonial studies and transnational studies (Risager 2018). For each of these perspectives it is possible to list a number of analytical questions that may be used in materials development or in the analysis of the cultural content of already existing materials for the teaching of any language.

Although the focus will not be on language, it should be borne in mind that all the perspectives have language dimensions as well. National studies would be interested in languages in their standard varieties; citizenship education studies would include linguistically diverse societies, including minority languages; Cultural studies would look at language practices and their relations to subjectivity and identity (region, class, ethnicity etc.) in complex societies; postcolonial studies would emphasise historical power relations and hierarchies between languages; and transnational studies would turn its focus on languages as transnational phenomena, for example their use as lingua francas.

Risager, K. (2018) Representations of the World in Language Textbooks. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.