Against the backdrop of globalization and intercultural education, this study adopts a corpus linguistics approach to investigate the discursive construction of Western images in six sets of mainstream senior high school English textbooks in China. A specialized text corpus is built from the selected textbooks, and the Ant Conc software is employed to systematically analyze three core dimensions: high-frequency words, topic distribution, and collocation patterns. The findings reveal that the Western images constructed in these textbooks exhibit a hierarchical structure, with national spaces as the foundation, identity labels as the core, and cultural symbols as supplementary elements. The overall semantic tendency is dominated by objective, neutral descriptive knowledge, emphasizing cultural cognition while down making evaluative judgments on values. Furthermore, while reshaping Western images, the textbooks strike a balance between global vision and cultural subjectivity through comparative discussions of Chinese and Western topics. Through large-scale corpus analysis, this study provides quantitative empirical evidence for the cultural representation in English textbooks, and offers theoretical implications for textbook compilation and intercultural teaching practices.
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Ma Y, Shi H. (2026) A Corpus-based Study of Western Images in Senior High School English Textbooks. Global Education Bulletin, 3(1), 13-24. https://doi.org/10.71052/grb2025/WRNN9547