The Russian Language Textbook as a Multimodal Object

Abstract

The school textbook has always been the most important tool for organizing the educational process. Many studies by Kazakhstani scholars have been devoted to the issue of the quality of Kazakhstani textbooks. However, most of the research primarily focuses on the verbal component of textbooks, while their visual design is often underestimated. This suggests that the school textbook is not considered a holistic multimodal object, each element of which (both verbal and non-verbal) is intended to contribute to developing students' multimodal literacy. Since the development of educational literature today is carried out not only by scholars but also by practicing educators, there is a need to study teachers' professional attitudes toward the multimodality of textbooks. The article employs a survey method to investigate teachers' evaluative perception of the visual design of Russian language textbooks for the 5th grade from the publishers “Mektep” and “AEO NIS”. The authors found out that teachers transfer their negative attitude towards the verbal component of the textbook to its non-verbal aspect, poorly understanding the didactic potential of the multimodality of the textbook, which hinders their successful work in shaping and developing students' multimodal literacy. In light of the insufficiently high ranking of Kazakhstani students in international studies such as PIRLS and PISA, the results obtained in the article acquire special relevance. Based on the conducted analysis, the authors propose recommendations for solving the identified problem.