Hidden Discourses in the “Forewords” of French as a Foreign Language (FFL) Textbooks

Abstract

In the field of foreign language education, textbooks continue to be one of the most important support materials for language teachers. Foreign language teaching methods are updated according to the requirements and needs that continuously arise over time. Authors of textbooks update their materials by following these innovations. In the “foreword” section of each book, you can normally find the general aims of the book, its target public, methodologies and materials that are at the disposal of students, and their intended learning outcomes, and the methodology and materials that are at the teachers’ disposal. In this study, we aim to reveal hidden discourses in the “foreword” sections of textbooks. When these sections are considered as texts, they can be regarded as informative pieces of writing that inform their readers about the overall purpose of writing a book, about the actual book that they refer to, and about the overall characteristics of the subject area. Consequently, in this research, we attempt to first classify various types of text. Second, we aim to clarify what types of “foreword” sections can in effect be examined. And finally, we analyze the linguistic deviations and masked discourses that were found in the structures of these text. Altogether, we examined 13 French textbooks—ranging from level 1 to teens and adults—to offer a wide range of examples in this important research field. We believe that this work is particularly useful for those French teachers who are in the position of making the choice for their schools’ future textbooks based on the “foreword” sections of these books.