This paper integrates studies from Intercultural Communication and Multimodal Discourse Analysis, aiming to reveal how Chinese English textbooks conduct ideological education. By adopting studies of cultural products and practices, along with the system of interactive meanings, it develops a new approach to evaluating the cultural representations at macro level and their image interaction with learners at micro level. Furthermore, analysis of 253 multimodal texts from a series of Chinese English textbooks shows that the distribution of cultural products and practices echoes the curriculum’s requirements of building cultural self-confidence. The occurrences of cultural practices reflect the shift from brief expressions to the manipulation of cultural products. Moreover, images interacting with learners tend to offer more cultural information, guide them to keep a suitable social distance and create equality for them. The framework and findings can be used to uncover the strategies of ideological education and contributes to foreign language textbook compilation.
Zhou et al. (2025) studied this question.