La representación de los problemas de salud mental en los manuales de español como lengua extranjera
| Title in English | The Representation of Mental Health Problems in Spanish as a Foreign Language Textbooks |
|---|---|
| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | ESTUDIOS DE LINGUISTICA-UNIVERSIDAD DE ALICANTE-ELUA |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| web | https://revistaelua.ua.es/article/view/28495 |
| Doi | https://doi.org/10.14198/ELUA.28495 |
| Keywords | Analysis of Teaching Materials; Mental Health Problems; Textbooks; Spanish as a Foreign Language; Mental Health Literacy; Critical Discourse Analysis |
| Attached files | |
| Description | Mental health issues represent one of the global challenges that society has to face nowadays, especially after the coronavirus pandemic. Within the framework of Applied Linguistics, foreign language teaching has the potential to contribute to mental health education and mental health literacy from an interdisciplinary perspective. Thus, this article focuses on the representation of mental health problems in textbooks for learning Spanish as a Foreign Language. The aim is to investigate how Spanish textbooks contribute to the development of mental health literacy among foreign learners of Spanish. From the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis and using an inductive-deductive methodology, a corpus of Spanish textbooks corresponding to B2, C1 and C2 levels according to the CEFR is analyzed to find out which mental health problems appear in these textbooks and how they are represented in the linguistic and textual contents. The results indicate that mental health and its problems are explicitly, albeit minimally, represented in the textbooks but far below the representation of physical health and its diseases. The analysis identifies various mental disorders, such as anxiety, depression or schizophrenia, among others; however, their references are found sporadically in texts or activities that do not delve deeply into the subject of mental health. In addition, the analysis highlights the lack of context when mental health problems are mentioned, as well as the scarcity of texts that can contribute in a significant way to mental health literacy; a fact that is not observed in the subject or content of other texts that contribute to the scientific or digital literacy of learners of Spanish. According to the low number of allusions to mental health and its problems, the sporadic nature of these references, the scarcity of texts dedicated to this issue and the lack of context to introduce this topic, we conclude that the Spanish textbooks analyzed construct a partial and simplistic representation of mental health problems. |
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