Texts are one of the basic components of a textbook and at the same time define it at the highest rate. Our focus was put on the role of dialogic texts in textbooks for learning French and Slovene as a foreign language.
In the theoretical part, we have first presented the text itself, especially its role in teaching foreign languages. More attention is paid to dialogic texts, as we assume that dialogic texts are the most suitable for the initial learning of a foreign language. Namely, with them learners immediately begin to develop communication skills in a foreign language, which is also the main goal of communication-oriented teaching. The concepts of authenticity and multimodality are also presented later on. In the authenticity of texts, in addition to the concept of the originality of texts, the authenticity of the situation also appears; this means that within the language class we create situations every person faces in real life. We also assume that dialogic texts are more authentic due to their relative brevity and interchangeability of individual components. Multimodality of texts certainly contributes to the authenticity of texts in textbooks. Multimodality refers to the image material that accompanies the text, to the visual presentation of the text itself (print, colours, font) as well as to the display of other ways of conveying it to the recepent (audio or video clip, web material).
In the empirical part, we reviewed four textbooks for initial learning of a foreign language: two for teaching Slovene as a foreign language, Čas za slovenščino 1 and A, B, C … gremo, and two for teaching French as a foreign language, Extra! 1 in Tendances. We concluded that dialogic texts are really the most suitable for the initial learning of a foreign language, as they immediately begin to develop communicative ability. There were only few actual authentic texts, but in all textbooks both texts and assignments lead to creating authentic situations. The multimodality of the texts also contributes enormously to this, as it only supports the experience of an authentic situation with various visual and audio material. The authenticity of the situation and multimodality are strongly interconnected, as they influence the essential factors of the communicative way of teaching a foreign language. Dialogue texts in modern textbooks enable personal identification, are appropriately placed in context and allow a possibility of linguistic variation, which together with the multimodal characteristics of the texts contributes to the creation of authentic situations within the language class.
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