Cognitive linguistics offers us many new possibilities in the field of teaching foreign languages. Although the beginnings lead back to the 1980s, it is still rarely used and rather unrecognised. The main characteristic that distinguishes it from other branches of linguistics, such as structuralism, is that it connects language with all cognitive capacities. The aim of our master’s thesis was to prove how the awareness of our mental processes present in learning foreign languages has grown over time. Thus, we compared two textbooks for French as a foreign language published in France. The first, Panorama 1, was published in 1997 and the second, Défi 1, in 2008. The results of the analyses are clear: Panorama 1, despite the fact that it is based on a communicative approach, still relies on outdated beliefs that language should be considered an autonomous system. On the other hand, Défi 1 proves to us just the opposite, that language is present in all our actions. Défi 1 encourages students to approach learning a new language with all the knowledge they have at their disposal and with all possible resources (internet, dictionaries, researches). To summarise, we can argue that there is visible progress that encourages the recognition of cognitive processes that facilitate foreign language learning.
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