Ideological views of reading in contemporary French textbooks: A content analysis

Abstract

Reading instructional practices in foreign languag­e (FL) classrooms often involve asking students to read a text aloud, answer comprehension questions about its referential meanings, and exchange personal opinions about topics evoked in the text. Such practices hint at ideological views of FL reading as a skill and springboard for communication. In an effort to identify the locus of such beliefs and practices, this article reports on a descriptive content analysis of nine beginning and intermediate commercial French textbooks to investigate the way reading, and readers, are positioned. Drawing on theoretical foundations of social semiotics, multiliteracies, and derivatives of Bloom’s Taxonomy, the study addresses two questions: (a) What kinds of texts are included in beginning and intermediate French textbooks? and (b) What kinds of tasks are students called upon to engage in during reading instruction? Findings reveal ideological views of reading as a mostly linguistic, cognitively oriented exercise, and assumptions that less linguistically proficient readers are less cognitively mature. The article concludes by problematizing textbooks as constructed discourses that prevent paradigm change in education and proposes an expansion of an existing textbook reading sequence as an Open Education Resource that engages learners in a critical multimodal analysis of an authentic text and its adaptation.