Bridging text and perception: Chinese cultural representation in multilingual textbooks corpora

With growing emphasis on integrating learners’ native culture into foreign language textbooks, existing research has largely focused on monolingual materials and content analysis, leaving university textbooks and user perceptions comparatively underexplored. This study examines six locally developed university foreign language textbooks in China spanning three languages, English, French, and Spanish, through content analysis, supplemented by questionnaire data collected from 803 English-major, 61 French-major, and 50 Spanish-major students across Chinese universities. Guided by a cultural ecology framework, the study investigates the forms (traditional, revolutionary, and modern Chinese culture) and categories (product, person, practice, perspective, and community) through which Chinese culture is represented, with particular attention to balance, coherence, and depth. Results indicate that modern Chinese culture emerges as the most prevalent cultural form across the three language textbook corpora, while cultural products are the most frequently represented category, indicating a strong tendency toward material orientation. Students’ responses further suggest that cultural practice is perceived as the most salient category across language groups, pointing to the pedagogical advantage of experience-near, action-oriented cultural content. These findings underscore the need for a more ecologically balanced approach to representing native culture in multilingual textbook corpora, with implications for both textbook development and pedagogy.