ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the first part of the results of the application of the political economic approach to Catalan language teaching materials. It begins by presenting the results of the quantitative analysis of the corpus. This is followed by an interpretation of the content through the key dimensions that index social class. The examples of social class from Catalan textbooks are discussed against the social and economic backdrop of Spain in the era of neoliberalism. The results suggest that textbooks tend to present an upper-middle-class reality, where the life of the participants is not limited by any economic restriction and their choices depend only on their personal preference. In the content of these textbooks, almost everything is represented as a neoliberal fairytale in which economic growth, attractive cosmopolitan careers and expensive journeys appear together with new houses and apartments and cars. This is, of course, a reality out of reach for a large portion of the world’s population, to say nothing of the majority of Catalan language students, especially those who are poor and working-class immigrants.
