Spanish

Abstract

Within the Spanish educational context, one of the most loyal and indisputable allies for teaching and learning foreign languages is the textbook. Several studies have been conducted on particular aspects of textbooks (Aguirre Lora, 2001; Escano, 2013; Autor, 2012; Jimenez Catalan, 2003; Nodarse Gonzalez & Mons Obermayer, 2013), but few of them carry out a holistic, diachronic and multimodal analysis. This study verifies the adequacy of textbooks for teaching and learning English as a foreign language to adults in a non-immersion context. Specifically, it analyzes the lexical level of the selected samples, the skills demanded by the activities, and the distribution of the lessons’ elements according to their semantics. The analytical tools used in the study include the lexical database English Vocabulary Profile , Bloom’s taxonomy (1956) and the principles of visual composition developed by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006). The main conclusions that can be drawn from this document are: the adequacy of the lexical level through the establishment of official standards, the common practice of lower order thinking skills rather than the higher ones, and the distribution of the elements around the horizontal axis, placing the already-known information on the left side and the new information on the right side. How to reference this article Gonzalez Romero, R. (2015). Analisis holistico, diacronico y multimodal de libros de texto de ingles como lengua extranjera: Una nueva forma de mejorar la comprension . Foro de Educacion , 13(19), 343-356. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14516/fde.2015.013.019.015