ABSTRACT
The notion of identity is prominent in the fields of both sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, and is oriented towards a critical understanding of the socio-cultural aspects of the teaching and learning of foreign languages. However, there is a lack of research into the notion of identity in language teaching materials and textbooks, particularly for teaching Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). This chapter focuses on problematising the identity work in CFL textbooks by applying the theoretical framework formulated with concepts of language, identity, role and interaction, that is, the Bifocal Operational Model for Analysing CFL Texts. Text analysis based on this model has revealed three main types of problems of identity work, that is, an inconsistency between linguistic proficiency and cultural naivety, essentialist categorisation because of cultural stereotyping and identity ambiguity because of arbitrary contextualisation.
