Teaching Culture in Introductory Foreign Language Textbooks

This book demonstrates how foreign language textbook analysis can inform future materials development to improve foreign language teaching. Through chronological analysis of French textbooks in the United States, this book explores the representations of Canada and Quebec in French beginner textbooks produced from 1960 to 2010. Chapelle couples a large collection of 65 textbooks with a social-semiotic qualitative analysis of the genres, language and images that communicate Quebecs cultural narrative to learners. Findings about the amount and type of content are presented by decade to track the trends in foreign language teaching and changes in Quebecs representation. Particular attention is given to how language politics is presented to students through text and images. This book will be of interest to scholars of Canadian Studies, Quebec Studies and Second Language Acquisition, as well as foreign language materials developers.