Istoria Angliei ȘI Modul DE Predare AL Acesteia ÎN Lile DIN România
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INTRODUCTION
We would not be exactly original when we affirm that «peace» is nowadays and in our country, as in others of what is called «our environment», not only a moral imperative, but also «the culture of peace». English culture and peace, constitute a hallmark of identity that as such allows us to draw an imaginary border that delimits a world of another, which, by opposition, would find in violence and war one of its defining features. The use of history in our societies is legitimized by the need to preserve it from internal-external aggressions, which threaten its harmony and is justified by means of a discourse, continuously updated, that is rooted in the moment in which the theocratic foundation of power at the hand of liberal revolutions. At this point we advance that in our reflection we will be at the opposite pole to the traditional conception on the role of historical education, eminently indoctrinating: the educational potential of History lies in its critical method of knowledge of the social, not in its capacity to transmit values / reproduce ideology through the evocative force of the past. Thus, historical education will contribute to form a solid culture of peace, not through the transmission of some historical content, but selected with purely ideological criteria, although we could share them, but to the extent that to provide citizens with knowledge and tools for critical understanding of the world and the society in which they live. The social commitment of the historian, as a social scientist, and of the teacher must also be in accordance with the disciplines they cultivate. A History and a Didactics of History conceived as instruments at the service of ideological apparatuses, constructed from purely ideological foundations, will contribute to sustaining the existing social order, but hardly to their critical knowledge. Any citizen can make political or moral assessments about the reality, past or present, that surrounds him; for that you do not have to be a historian. However, the historian has methodological tools that allow him to establish explanations about historical facts, which contribute to their understanding beyond the ideological apriorisms.
The great majority of the debates and researches that have been generated both at national and international level about the textbook coincide in defining it as a fundamental factor in the formation of subjects and, therefore, as an indispensable element for the transmission of knowledge . What do we mean by textbook? Without defining a rigid definition, it is worth noting that there is a multiplicity of responses: a materiality, a curricular proposal, a bearer of meanings, a high circulation periodical, a teacher-student mediator, among others. Thus, it is worth noting that the concept of textbook refers to a great complexity and it is clear that there is no consensus about its definition. If we make reference to the daily language of the school it is possible to find a great variety of denominations with respect to the textbook. Thus, terms such as: school textbook, guide book and so on are used, making an indistinct use in their definition.
Textbooks are very useful especially for novice teachers and students because they:
offer guidance in what concern course and activity design
assure a measure of structure and consistency
assure logical progression in a class
are essential for those students who want to have soemthing concrete to work home and take home for further study
provide multiple resources like :CDs, self-study woorkbooks etc.
The aim of the present paper is related to the desire of being a starting point for all teachers, including me, who have not thought too much about the importance of the texbook for the success of the teaching process regarding the students’ level. In some cases the use of the textbook to students to its best advantage seems to be overlooked when teachers prepare for the teaching activity. There is also another aspect: at the begining of the teaching activity, recently garduated teachers, do not know what to do without a textbook in the classroom. Others are on the other extreme: they do not know what to do with a textbook since they have concentrated more on learining about using technology in the classroom, how to design rubrics and so on. Therefore, I think there should be an equilibrum amoung everything teachers do in the classroom during the teaching process.
CHAPTER I.
THEORETICAL ASPECTS OF HISTORICAL EDUCATION PROCESS
1.1 The formative value of History of England
History of England, understood as a school subject in the English textbooks, should not be conceived as a body of finished knowledge, but as an approach to knowledge in construction. This approach must be performed through paths that incorporate inquiry, the approach to the historical method and the conception of History as a social science and not simply as a scholarly or simply curious knowledge. Therefore, it is important to define History of England to be taught as a body of knowledge that not only incorporates what we already know thanks to historians, but also tells us how knowledge is built and what are the processes and questions that we must ask ourselves to obtain an explanatory idea of the past. In this respect, one would try to define the educational value of this discipline and to determine through which elements the didactic incorporated aims can be reached.
Few people discuss the role that History plays in society. As a result, the conception of time that Western culture has generated -as a linear and progressive process, endowed with a beginning and an end- has facilitated the development of a conception of History that is also endowed with an origin, a development and a final status. However, this conception of time is eminently cultural and not all civilizations perceive historical time in the same way; One could suggest the existence of a cyclical time, without beginning or end, as many cultures have done, including England. In fact, the appearance of a linear conception of time and, therefore, of History is connected to the development of the idea of progress and to the analysis of the behaviour of England society over time. Perhaps because one’s conception of time is linear, in the West the role of History is not a matter of debate. Hence, it has been used to justify the human actions, to demonstrate the pre-eminence of one over the other, as a tool of struggle to overcome the stages of an unworthy past, but also to justify power. Actually, without History, humans would be extraordinarily poorer; it is unimaginable to conceive a cultured society that does not know or does not consider its origins as a species, group or country. History is a matter that, groped, adulterated, gagged, falsified or exalted, has always been used. Its function is to remember, and its birth is always preceded by a more or less traumatic past for the civilian population. It is evident that History is born as a kind of reparatory memorials that keep alive the memory of barbarism and fight to avoid the impunity of its intellectual or material authors. However, it should be remembered that the History to be taught must have requirements that, connected to the coldness of the analysis, serve to reflect in the most objective way possible about the past; especially about those events that are closest in time. If historians use documents to objectify the past by diving in "dusty" archives, when addressing a subject in which they are involved, it will be difficult to get rid of the ideological-emotional and interpretative connotations, but the effort of consideration between the subject (the researcher) and the object (the researched), as well as the application of the historical method, will temper very significantly the bias or the emotional and ideological implication. In other words, the task of the teacher must tend towards anonymity and objectification during the explanation.
What is interesting is explaining what happened, but not constituting a moral judge of the past. In this respect, this function can not be achieved without shedding emotional implications of the present and, even less, of personalized or interested interpretations to justify a political project. In any case, the memory of past events is a stimulus for historical thought, which challenges students to build its understanding, contextualization, interpretation and, as a consequence, explanation. A big mistake is to use the historical discipline to transmit political or ideological slogans, without respecting the scientific character of the historiographical analysis. In many countries there are institutional proposals consisting of the use of historical events and ephemerides that claim to justify ideas about the present, usually of a nationalist nature, or legitimize current political realities. On different occasions, governments and some politicians strive to enhance historical myths and epics that seem to reinforce their own thesis on the conception of the state or international relations. This manipulation, probably unconscious in some cases, occurs through the promotion of centenarians, celebrations and other events. The problem lies in the fact that these institutional actions, by their own intentionality, nature and communicative format in which they are presented, usually offer a non-objective view of what they commemorate. This does not mean that campaigns or ephemeris celebrations are avoided, but they should be avoided, serving to bring History to the citizens, including students, and motivating them in the desire to know the past and learn the lessons that can improve the present. At the same time, governments use History -in a school context- and take advantage of their power as soon as they order and inspect the system, in order to try to shape the conscience of citizens, trying to offer a vision of the past that serves to strengthen patriotic feelings, overestimate national glories or simply create political accessions. In these cases the use of myths, clichés or xenophobic aspects while excluding views can turn this discipline into an anti-educational element.
1.2 The functions of History in our society
The school uses History for educational purposes. However, this discipline is socially perceived in a different manner depending on cultural contexts, regardless of the needs or demands that one can defend from education. History, together with religion, coexists in all human societies; both constitute two cultural universals. However, the concept of History that different cultures have developed, as well as the concept of religion, can differ in space and time. There are many conceptions of History, even though among us History is a comparative scientific discipline that analyzes all societies over time. Naturally, contemporary societies have used a wide variety of resources to transmit History: in the past European societies, one used epic literature; other cultures have approached oral tradition, as is the case of many societies. Since the Enlightenment, much of the West has used the school or the museum, in the same way that American society now uses film and television to show its History of freedom and slavery, its emancipator struggles and its colonization of lands, and also the myths. In reality, these communicative instruments of History are inscribed in much more complex frameworks of cultural policies that can not be analyzed here. However, it is feasible and necessary to address the possible functions of History in our society:
• The patriotic function of reinforcing the sense of self-esteem of a collective.
• The propaganda function, of launching positive messages about a regime or system.
• The ideological function, which consists of introducing ideas or ideological systems through museography.
• The historical memory function, which consists of keeping certain memories alive.
• The scientific function.
• The pseudo-didactic function.
• The function for cultural leisure.
• History as an ideal subject for education.
These functions are manifested above all in school and in History museums. Both educational institutions, daughters of the Enlightenment, have similar functions.
1.3 The general purposes of History as an educational subject
History, as an academic discipline, is one of the educational subjects that have the greatest possibilities for students education and instruction. It must be, therefore, respected and taught correctly in our primary and secondary education curricula. This affirmation is not based on the corporatist idea of those who teach History in the educational system, but rather on the increasingly rigorous verification of the great benefits that its adequate teaching and the transformations experienced by those who learn it. The four main areas that determine its possibilities in the teaching / learning process are the following:
• It facilitates the understanding of the present times.
• It contributes to develop the intellectual faculties.
• It enriches other topics of the curriculum and stimulates hobbies for leisure time.
• It helps to acquire social, aesthetic, scientific sensitivity and so on.
In this respect, one would appreciate each one of these aspects, which can be considered of a general and applicable character -in their appropriate level-, in all the educational stages, from the first to the most advanced one.
History facilitates the understanding of the present times
It is a consolidated topic to affirm that History serves to understand the present. But, as it is well known, History is not the social science that studies the present, as geography, economics, sociology, political science or other social disciplines does whose purpose is to analyze the current world. In fact, what History tries to explain is the past and this is its main purpose. Why is it said so surely that it serves to understand our present? A common error is that which derives from the so-called historicism, which considers all reality as the product of a historical evolution, ignoring the contemporary component that has any current situation. But it is true that any vision of the present, studied with the social sciences that analyze it, is enriched and explained, in large part, when one has a historical perspective that contextualizes in time, space and a certain social reality any phenomenon and even event. For this reason, one can affirm that History, although it does not explain the present, facilitating, to a large extent, its understanding, and this for the following eight reasons:
1. It allows to analyze, exclusively, the temporal tensions.
2. It studies the causality and consequences of historical events.
3. It explains the complexity of social problems.
4. It allows to build diagrams of differences and similarities.
5. It studies change and continuity in societies.
6. It powers rationality in the analysis of the social, political, and so on.
7. It teaches how to use social research methods and techniques.
8. It helps to know and contextualize the cultural and historical roots.
For all these didactic virtues, the historical study is the one that offers the most possibilities to educate the students in the creation of a rational and grounded view of the local, national and global environment. History is the social knowledge that best allows understanding the functioning of societies, which is a fundamental element to face the understanding of the present. If it is taught in all its potential, students will learn to be conscious and lucid citizens when it comes to assessing and analyzing the contemporary problems that surround us.
History contributes to develop the intellectual faculties
Cognitive abilities or intellectual skills are acquired in the ordinary life of people. In school environments, one must work and be empowered in any teaching and learning process. If they are projected as achievable objectives through work in the different curricular areas, the advances experienced by the students can be spectacular. All ages allow to work on the development of intellectual skills and all subjects of the curriculum must include them. The study of History from an early age is an excellent means to develop the intellect; especially some of the most interesting abilities in the intellectual development of people. From the approach that considers its learning as an active process of discovery and inquiry, the teaching of History requires working in the classroom through rational observations, among which are the ability to classify, compare, analyze, describe, infer, explain, memorize, order ideas and so on. One of the most important advantages that can be achieved through the teaching of this subject is the possibility of accelerating and provoking the development of formal thought at ages prior to which some of the schools of evolutionary psychology have established. For all these reasons, one can affirm that History helps to shape the mind through a disciplined and systematic study, hence the development of intellectual abilities must be included as one of its main objectives.
History enriches other topics of the curriculum and stimulates hobbies for free time
History, together with geography, has the possibility of constituting itself as the axis that structures various social sciences, so that, through the study of these disciplines, there are approaches to the different perspectives of social knowledge: economic activity, anthropology, law and politics, artistic expression, et cetera. As a consequence, it is possible to approach many curricular subjects if one starts from the historical study. Along with this possibility, historical knowledge offers context to many other disciplines: literature, mathematics, natural sciences. There are several didactic tendencies that try to approach the different disciplines from the beginning of the historical processes of knowledge creation.
But one of the most interesting possibilities of a good didactics of History in the school environment should not be missed. It is about fostering taste and the practice of inquiry into the past which is very frequent of cultural leisure in the most advanced countries. Much of the local History studies are due to societies of amateur historians who devote part of their time to that activity. Along with this widespread practice among ordinary people who have cultural concerns, it is evident the taste and demand for activities related to the knowledge of the past: from museums to theme parks or interpretation centres, in addition to the existence of a growing fondness for the reading of historical magazines or popular works and television channels specialized in History issues.
History serves to acquire sensitivity (or conscience) with respect to social formations
Finally, it is necessary to refer to an area that, because of its conceptual inaccuracy, ceases to be fundamental in the educational possibilities of the study of History. We refer to the acquisition of sensitivity for social issues. When we use this expression we refer to a force of knowledge that implies passion, empathy and rationality: it supposes an affectionate and rational look. Sensitivity is an explosive combination of rationality and passion, theory and feeling. Thinking with sensitivity is the evidence of how deep and mysterious is the capacity of knowledge, combining intelligence and desire, thus enriching perception. Therefore, sensitivity has a great strength that apparently seems irrational, but that is able to support certainties of difficult foundation. The combination of intelligence and sensitivity is the key of the most interesting and productive learning, in the broadest sense of the word.
1.4 History as a subject of great formative potential in the educational process
In contemporary societies History has an important role. History is more than the teacher of life as defined by Herodotus, a knowledge that is often used as a justification of the present. We live in societies that use History to legitimize political, cultural and social actions, and this is no novelty.
What one appreciates is the usefulness of the study of History for the integral formation (intellectual, social and affective) of children and adolescents. The presence of History in education is justified by many and varied reasons. In addition to being part of the construction of any conceptual perspective within the framework of the Social Sciences, it has, from our point of view, a self-sufficient interest as an educative subject of great formative potential. Among other possibilities, we have selected the ones that follow. The study of History can serve in education for:
– History facilitates the understanding of the present, since there is nothing in the present that can not be better understood by knowing the background. History does not pretend to be the "only" discipline that tries to help understand the present, but it can be affirmed that, with it, its knowledge acquires greater richness and relevance. Regarding this question it must be said that History does not explain the present, but the past. And it is not only the story of the past, but the analysis of it. It serves to explain the present because it offers a perspective that helps its understanding. The arguments that justify this purpose of History as an educational matter are the following:
• It allows to analyze, exclusively, the temporal tensions
• It studies the causality and the consequences of the historical facts
• It allows to build diagrams of differences and similarities
• It studies the change and continuity in societies
• It explains the complexity of social problems
• It powers rationality in the analysis of social, political, etc.
– History prepares students for adult life. History offers a frame of reference to understand social problems, to situate the importance of daily events, to critically use information, to live with full civic awareness.
– History awakens interest in the past, which indicates that History is not synonymous with the past. The past is what happened, History is the research that explains and gives coherence to this past. For this reason, History raises fundamental questions about this past from the present, which does not stop being a reflection of great contemporaneity and, therefore, susceptible of commitment.
– History promotes a sense of identity in children and adolescents. Having an awareness of the origins means that when they are adults they can share values, customs, ideas and so on. This question is easily manipulated from nationalist perspectives and exaggerations. Our conception of education can not lead to exclusion or sectarianism, so that identity itself will always take on its positive dimension as it moves towards a better understanding of what is different, which amounts to talking about values of tolerance.
– History helps students understand their own cultural roots and common heritage. This aspect is intimately linked to the previous point. One can not impose a standard or uniform culture in the planetary sphere to young people from a society as diverse as today's culture. However, it is quite true that we share a large part of the common culture. It is necessary to place this "inheritance" in its proper context.
– History contributes to the knowledge and understanding of other countries and cultures of the world today. In this respect, History must be an instrument to help value "others". Countries like England, which have lived isolated for historical and political reasons, must counteract this situation by fostering understanding towards other neighbouring or exotic societies.
– History contributes to develop the faculties of the mind through a disciplined study, since it depends to a large extent on rigorous and systematic research. Historical knowledge is a discipline for the formation of ideas about human events, which allows the formulation of opinions and analysis on things much more strict and rational. The process that leads to it is an excellent intellectual exercise.
– History introduces students to the knowledge and mastery of a rigorous methodology of the historians. The skills required to reconstruct the past can be useful for the student's education. The historical method, as will be seen later, can be simulated in the didactic field, which involves training in the ability to analyze, inference, formulate hypotheses, etc.
– History enriches other areas of the curriculum, since its aim is developed; it tries to organize "all" the past and, therefore, its study serves to strengthen other branches of knowledge; it is useful for literature, for philosophy, for knowledge of scientific progress, for music, etc. In fact, there are many disciplines that are not possible without knowing something about History and its History.
All of these elements develop in a world rich in educational possibilities, which can take a varied conceptual form, fully consistent with the limits and contents of the Social Sciences in the context of education. Considering the aims that these subjects can provide to the education of the future citizens, History establishes the didactic objectives that must be considered in a teaching environment.
1.5 The didactic objectives and principles of History
The main teaching objectives of History are the following:
First objective: To understand the events that occurred in the past and to know how to situate them in their context.
Second objective: To understand that in the analysis of the past there are many different points of view.
Third objective: To understand that there are very different ways to acquire, obtain and evaluate information about the past.
Fourth objective: To be able to convey in an organized way what it has been studied or obtained regarding the past.
Sometimes it is discussed whether it is convenient for History to exist as a matter of learning at the basic levels. It is evident that in order to measure whether the contents of History are useful and necessary for the students of regulated education, it would have to be previously considered if those contents respond to any of the educational needs of the recipients and if, on the other hand, they realize the aim of their capabilities. From this point of view, both respond fully to the training needs of students and constitute a valid component in an education project that is not based, only, on the accumulation of information, but on the development of skills of children and adolescents. It is clear that this statement requires a certain qualification. The contents of History are useful insofar as they are susceptible of being manipulated by the students. In this respect, one must take into account the degree of cognitive development of each age group and, at the same time, subordinate the selection of content and didactic approaches to the educational needs and cognitive abilities of schoolchildren.
In other words, each age will require a different stage of historical knowledge. It should proceed starting from works dealing with capacities of domain of notions of conventional time, passing to domain of the spatial situation of objects, localities or wider geographical units, until arriving, at the end of the educational cycles, to formulate analyzes and characterizations about historical periods or analysis of landscapes and social realities.
1.6 The nature of History and its teaching
To know or understand a historical event we need to receive historical information, but the components of this information are not the purpose, but the beginning, since History is not reduced to knowing the names, dates and events. An "understanding" is necessary to be able to give an explanation about why things happened in a certain way in the past. However, information is the basis for understanding. The first fundamental objective must be "understanding" in order to reach the explanation. First of all, there must be a frame of reference in which events make sense. Therefore, one of the basic elements of understanding is given by the characterization of different social formations. Only within these characterizations can the facts be explained in part without falling into anachronisms or incomplete views of reality.
The problem that arises many times is that when working on specific topics, often connected to local History, the reference of the general explanation of the period and the social setting in which the History of a certain place is framed is lost within the story of a certain event. Therefore, we should insist on contextualization, which basically means giving a general value to a specific element. The understanding of the facts is not possible without bearing in mind the beliefs of the protagonists, agents or patients of the facts.
The next step is the explanation. Here it is about finding out the causes of the events and the consequences that derive from them. This aspect is fundamental in History that, unlike other disciplines, is more interested in the significance of the facts than in the facts themselves. Despite the interest in causes and consequences, the historian does not always have an absolute certainty that those causes are the only or the determining factors of an event. For this reason, as it has already been pointed out, the past is difficult to present with absolute objectivity. We have to select the information, the documents, the possible witnesses, etc., while the points of view of the historians will differ in many cases and, in addition, they will change with the passage of time.
1.7 Strategies for the formation of historical-temporary notions and representations in schools
The Didactics recognizes as one of the categories to give treatment from History to historical time, associated with space, protagonists, facts, causes, factors, structuring elements to understand the historical reality. However, the treatment of historical time has been reduced to a skill associated with the elaboration of timelines and to chronologically order of the facts and historical personalities studied in school. Researchers consider that one can not reduce the historical time only to these skills, which perceive the story only as a linear chronological sequencing of historical events, but it leaves out the complexity of the temporary historical development and above all to the students themselves as protagonists of History. From a History that conceives only a linear time that monolithically encompasses the sequence of actions and events, one must consider a historical time that recognizes "the simultaneity of durations, movements and diverse changes that occur in a human collectivity throughout a determined period". The History of other nationalities, for example, is traditionally used to educate the student regarding the temporality, without explicitly including his own or his family History; even in some didactic conceptions that are sustained from dialectical and historical materialism, in practice, the conviction of the necessary inclusion of personal and family History as an unavoidable part for the understanding of local, national, regional and universal History, is not appreciated.
Some strategies that favour the formation of notions and historical-temporal representations will be presented below. In this respect, teaching-learning strategies of temporality are understood as "the set of pedagogical actions that the teacher determines for the students to develop the notions and historical-temporal representations, as well as the actions that the students determine and perform in order to appropriate the historical didactic content, taking advantage of the temporary didactic resources". The strategies are based on taking advantage of the sources’ potential that enable the temporary education of students, integrating methods that favour cognitive independence and forms of organization that correspond to a teaching-learning process of History. These strategies are deployed in both new content classes and those developed in order to systematize and consolidate temporary historical contents. This does not suppose a system of strategies that are only in function of the temporality, but they represent the temporality according to an articulating axis of the teaching-learning process, integrating the rest of the components and making possible the historical education of students; there is no historical education apart from the education of temporality. The strategies proposed are the following:
Oral presentation. In this respect, one could:
obtain factual information with emphasis on the temporal aspect from the dramatization.
obtain factual information with emphasis on the temporal aspect from the teacher's narrative.
obtain factual information with emphasis on the temporal aspect from the narration of a student.
identify, from a narration of the teacher, the historical fact.
identify, from the exposure of the teacher or student, the historical personality in its interaction with the popular masses.
expose in the form of narration, description, characterization, identification, assessment and simple explanations what it has been learned about the studied facts and historical personalities.
expose the micro investigations that are performed.
present the results of the micro investigations in scientific sessions.
Work with texts. In this respect, one could:
locate and process necessary factual information about a historical event and its protagonists.
locate and process factual information about the main facts in which the student and his ancestors were involved.
locate and summarize information that explains the causes and consequences of historical events.
recognize in a text the elements that characterize a historical event and its temporary location.
order, in the paragraphs of a text, the passing of a historical event or a historical period.
order, in a text, the actions in which a historical personality participates in its interaction with the popular masses.
Work with visual media (photographs, slides, drawings). In this respect, the student could:
locate visual images related to personal, family, local and national History.
recognize in a visual environment the elements that characterize a historical event and its temporary location.
sort a set of visual images related to personal, family, local and national History.
identify a historical fact in a visual environment.
identify a historical personality in a visual environment.
describe images that reflect the historical activity of humans in History.
describe the objects connected to personal and family activity.
identify the objects connected to the historical activity of humans in History, differentiating them by historical stages.
relate images of historical events with the image of the personality that stars him.
relate images of family events with their protagonist.
Work with audiovisual media. In this respect, the student could:
recognize in an audiovisual environment the elements that characterize a historical event and its temporary location.
get factual information with emphasis on the temporal from a narrative.
describe and narrate historical facts.
identify historical facts and historical personalities.
sort a sequence of events.
sort a sequence of activities of a historical personality.
Work with objects of material and spiritual culture. In this respect, the student could:
describe objects of material and spiritual culture that typify each historical period related to personal, family, local and national History.
identify objects of the material and spiritual culture that typify each historical period related to personal, family, local and national History.
compare objects of material and spiritual culture, in order to identify different historical ages.
relate the objects of material and spiritual culture with the activities that man performs in each historical epoch.
identify in the locality objects of material and spiritual culture that last, directly or indirectly related to national and local History.
promote conservation actions and dissemination of the local cultural heritage, with the active involvement of the school.
Work with chronology. In this respect, the student could:
elaborate chronologies about personal and family History.
sort the main personal events in a chronological order.
sort the main personal events in their nexus with the familiar from a chronological perspective.
identify the actions in which each member of the family participated.
identify, in a set of actions, those that belong to each involved individual.
identify the main local and national facts of each historical stage, specifying the sequence in which they occur (locating the before and after aspects).
elaborate chronologies of the main local and national facts.
elaborate chronologies with the main actions performed by the historical local and national personalities in different stages.
sort the main local and national events from a chronological perspective.
sort the main local and national events, regarding their connection from a chronological perspective.
identify the actions in which each historical personality has participated.
identify, in a set of actions, those that belong to each historical personality.
sort the main actions in which the personalities studied in each historical stage have participated, from a chronological perspective.
identify the relationship between the facts, specifying what happened before and after.
Work with time graphs. In this respect, the student could:
make a line or graph of time using the years, decades and centuries as units of measure.
make personal and family time lines or graphs.
make lines or time graph by historical stages that have been studied.
draw lines or time graph of a historical personality in his interaction with the popular masses.
make lines or time graph of a historical period.
place the main personal events on a line or time chart.
place on a line or time chart the main personal events in their connection with the family.
locate on a line or time chart the main local and national historical events by stages and period of History.
place on a line or time chart the main local and national historical events by stages and period of History.
In this respect, the acquisition of a system of knowledge, skills and values where temporality is a basic component, contributes to the development of historical thought, while developing cognitive interests, promoting a collaborative, reflective, contextualized, experiential, self-regulated learning, with an individual and social nuance, which, as a result, produces students’ changes in the ways of thinking, feeling and acting. In order to achieve these changes in the teaching process, it is essential to make a correct selection of the methods to be used, where the diagnosis of the group and each school plays an important role. The teacher, attending the needs and potential of his students, promotes learning situations that materialize in the teaching tasks, with the aim of exercising thought.
CHAPTER II. GENERAL ASPECTS REGARDING THE ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS IN ROMANIA
2.1 Analyzing the English Textbooks
Textbooks play very important roles in teaching and learning English as a foreign language, they provide the main form of linguistic input. The studies previously done on EFL textbooks have focused on the authenticity of language samples included in textbooks as well as explanations of appropriate usage. Sheldon states that textbooks are considered as the most important material of any English language teaching program and they are almost universal elements in this era, but the studies and researches on the roles of EFL textbooks in teaching and learning a foreign language still apparently exists. There are some criticisms about the presentation of language including grammatical forms and techniques which refer to the use of the invented scripts and intuition to create and explain language samples. "Only through materials that reflect how we really speak, rather than how we think we speak, will language learners receive an accurate account of the rules of speaking in a second or foreign language".
Textbooks are an important tool in teaching and learning languages in many contexts worldwide. They have become the main support of language teachers, especially for novice ones, who sometimes learn to teach with the teacher's manual. Textbooks are so relevant in teaching practice that a careful selection of them must be made. This type of election could affect many teachers and students because any mistakes made in this sense could manifest in serious teaching and learning problems. Changing a textbook in any institution is not easy for several reasons. One is that teachers get used to a textbook and change is always difficult to accept. Another reason is that new class plans and materials should be developed despite the fact that the publishing house provides several of them such as teacher's guides and some other components such as recordings and exams; any way, they must adapt to the institution. The textbook that is selected must be appropriate for the level of students. Then it is necessary a good evaluation to be done before adopting it.
The textbook has thus become a medium that has consolidated itself as a cultural and scholarly transmitter, to such an extent that, as it has now to become invisible, and with that its potentialities have become invisible as Didactic means.
Nowadays, a new social context is emerging in which the creation, elaboration, reorganization, diffusion and use of information become determining elements in the relationships established by people with their social and cultural environment. In this type of society, information flows become determinant of economic and social progress, a society in which knowledge and competitive ability contribute more to progress than the natural resources of industrial society and where "essential values no longer reside in physical media, but in the growing production of intangible goods and in the development of knowledge that becomes a strategic resource".
Before analyzing the design and production of school textbooks, we need to clarify what this concept means, because in the wide range of printed teaching materials, not all are textbooks. Not all printed materials used to teach are teaching materials. There are different types of books (novels, essays, art books, encyclopaedias, dictionaries) and although they can all be used as teaching resources in an optimal way, one will say that there is a group of books that have been specifically designed and produced to teach (whether as a resource in formal or non-formal contexts).
Taking as a starting point the distinction between a didactic book (specifically designed to contribute to the teaching process) and a technical book (designed as a specialized technical aid or for information purposes, books that are part of the culture in general), one will include in this first category of textbooks three types:
• children's books (designed so that the youngest ones will learn basic concepts and develop their intellectual abilities), most of which are designed to focus on reading at home by an adult;
• school textbooks (formal textbooks for formal education)
• university books (manuals intended for higher education, so that their relation to the aspects of regulated education is less narrow, becoming treaties about a discipline or field of knowledge that can be used for different teaching situations or even as books of consultation beyond regulated teaching).
To facilitate a definition that concretes the idea, one will say that we understand as the school manual (school textbook or textbook) the editorial product built specifically for teaching. A printed school material or a textbook is edited for specific use as a teaching assistant and promoter of learning. We can therefore state that they have been specifically designed to teach, so they are didactic not because they are associated with the school attributes, nor because they are used in a school context, they are didactic for the purpose in which they have been designed. As a more significant characteristic, they present a systematic progression that implies a concrete proposal of the order of learning and a teaching model.
Nowadays, no one questions the influence that print media have had on the processes of systematic or spontaneous teaching, and how they have been conceived, along with other media, as a key part of socialization processes. In this sense, Sancho (2010) analyzed the role of the media in the social environment recognizing that the school is not the only or more influential institution involved in the education of young people, but that the enormous cultural production (cinema, theatre, Books, etc.) and new ways of presenting information through new technologies "have multiplied the universe of social representations, making available an enormously expanded space of socialization".
Added to all this, the critics of the textbooks appear as a current in which it emphasizes Apple (2004) affirming that the school textbooks reinforce the capitalism, the sexism, the classism, the racism, forming part of a system of regulation moral. The author considers that they are an essential instrument of advice for the task of teaching and are part of broader strategies of influence. It also emphasizes the need to analyze what knowledge prevails in an authoritarian way in the classroom, for whom and for what purposes serves, in short, to consider the importance of textbooks from a reflection that goes beyond explicit content or of graphic or pedagogical design.
2.2 Types of textbooks
Another perspective of study, related to the previous one, is the one that deals with the "history of textbooks and their mutations" that have undergone under the influence of the technologies of the information and of the communication. Alain Choppin (2002), a French researcher recognized for his contributions to the construction of the history of textbooks, states that books can perform four essential functions:
1. A referential function, also called curricular or programmatic: the textbook translates the broader curricular requirements and constitutes the privileged support of educational contents, it is a repository of knowledge, techniques or skills that a social group deems necessary to transmit to the new generations.
2. An instrumental function: the textbook presents learning methods, proposes exercises or activities that, according to contexts and times, aims to facilitate the memorization of knowledge, favour the acquisition of disciplinary or transversal competences, the appropriation of savoir- faire, methods of analysis or resolution, among other purposes.
3. An ideological and cultural function: this is the oldest function. Since the nineteenth century, with the constitution of nation-states and their development, in that process, of the main educational systems, the textbook is affirmed as one of the essential tools that shape the language, culture and values of classes Leaders.
4. A documentary function: the textbook provides a set of textual or iconic documents whose observation and confrontation intend to develop the student's critical spirit.
According to Choppin (2002), the historical analysis shows that the distribution of the various generic functions of the textbook has known clear evolutions. The ideological and cultural function is chronologically the first: the most traditional textbooks, derived from religious literature, had as their main objective, if not exclusive, to instill in young generations a system of moral, political and religious values. During the nineteenth century, with the development of educational programs and with the secularization of all or part of the educational contents, the referential function becomes increasingly important: it conditions the internal organization of the manuals in stereotyped chapters where a hierarchical presentation of contents preceded the eventual exercises. The instrumental function will be developed later, in relation to the intense pedagogical reflection that takes place in western countries towards the end of the nineteenth century. There is then an "inflation" of the pedagogical apparatus. The development of the documentary function, which is a teacher with a particularly high level of education, is a much more recent phenomenon but has contributed to a profound change over the last thirty years in the structure and use of manuals in the majority of different countries.
If, in a different era, the textbooks were elaborated more like a study book in which information was prevailed, and the activities, if any, were limited to a series of questions at the end of each chapter, today they are a tool of everyday use where images, texts and narratives overlap. In these processes of change, for Grinberg, there are important several factors such as: "the inclusion of marketing and advertising, the production of knowledge within the framework of the didactics of the disciplines, cognitive psychology or the development of technologies related to design and layout ".
Although, as Allwright points out, ”the business established around learning is of such magnitude and complexity that one can not be expected that the decisions made regarding a given material marketed to large scale users fully satisfy their users, publishers are forced to offer products that are flexible enough to allow different levels of reading and authorize multiple tours of the book”. Specifically, there are two possible options in the market: the first is the "multimedia" book, which associates the manual – which retains the central place – a series of "peripheral tools" (chips, cassettes, compact discs, workbooks and so on) that assume specific functions. The second, less expensive, is the integrated textbook, responsible for fulfilling all of the functions. In this second option, the concern to provide a response to the plurality of possible uses required by the new demands of the teachers determines a certain complexity of the instrument, which has led the editors to include, in the first pages of different editions, a section designed to explain the purpose of the various graphic resources: arrows, asterisks, question marks, logos of different types identify different areas of the textual structure.
The reading of a textbook, therefore, both by the networks of multiple references that are established between the various elements of a double page and by a system of particular signals, is very close to the procedures put into play in hypertexts. Thus, since it presents a discontinuous, disjointed, multiform discourse, the manual does not present itself as a book in which it is possible to carry out a reading activity followed, as can be done in other types of editions. To paraphrase Choppin (2002) we can say that the textbook, which is searched and zapping, is not a book that reads but a book "in which" is read. The "overexploitation of graphic resources" intended to guide the reader's interpretation constitutes one of the most obvious manifestations of the lack of confidence in the reader: "particularly in didactic texts, one used all kinds of resources – drawings, boxes or backgrounds of different colour, change of type and so on – because the punctuation is not enough to guide the interpretation of a reader considered, a priori, as incompetent.”
Other aspect integrates the "critical, historical and ideological studies" about the content of the textbooks and tries to uncover the explicit or implicit ideology that textbooks carry: the visions that are provided of "ones and others", the problems that are emphasized and those that are silent, the voices that are included and those that are ignored, the cultural stereotypes that are reinforced and those that are questioned. Although this dimension is much clearer in books belonging to social disciplines, it can be studied in manuals used in other subjects.
With respect to the format, some researchers pointed out that this is the basis of all the graphic design of the book and that the layout of the pages, the line length, the interline and the body of the letter are determined in relationship with it. Certain authors considered that the definition of the format influences practical criteria (their use almost always implies that they are opened on the desks and that they are loaded for the house and for the school, sometimes they are placed on the shelves of libraries that have standard dimensions), pedagogical criteria (their function, the form of interaction with them, psychological characteristics of students that, according to the level of schooling, involve mastery of a particular visual area) and industrial criteria (cost rationalization ).
2.3 Components of English textbooks
English textbooks involve two components: texts and the extra textual components. The texts carry the knowledge and activities that must be assimilated by the students; the extra textual components have the function of organizing the assimilation of teaching content and facilitating their understanding and practical use. Both texts and extra textual components occupy a place close to the cusp. One conceived the structural subsystem called text as composed of basic text, complementary text and clarifying text, as specified below:
The basic text includes the theoretical-cognitive texts and instrumental texts; these are characterized as follows: the cognitive-theorists have as their dominant function the presentation of the information. Its contents are:
1) the main terms and the language of a specific sphere of scientific knowledge that represents a given teaching subject;
2) key concepts and their definitions;
3) the main facts;
4) the characteristics of fundamental laws, regularities and their consequences;
5) the reflection of the main theories;
6) the characteristics of the development of guiding ideas and of the directions of perspective in a particular branch of knowledge;
7) the basic materials to form an emotional-axiological attitude to the world;
8) generalizations and ideological assessments and about the conception of the world;
9) the conclusions and the summary.
The practical- instrumental English texts play a predominantly transformative role (application of knowledge) and their contents are:
1) the characteristics of the methods of activity necessary to assimilate the teaching material and independently obtain the knowledge;
2) the characteristics of the principles and rules of application of knowledge;
3) the characteristics of the fundamental methods of knowledge in a given branch of knowledge, including applied methods;
4) the description of the tasks, exercises, experiences, experiments and situations necessary to deduce the rules and generalities to assimilate the theoretical-cognitive information;
5) the elaboration of the set of exercises, tasks, experiments and independent works necessary to form the complex of basic skills;
6) the characteristics of the ideological, moral and aesthetic standards necessary for activity in a given area;
7) the characteristics of the logical operations and of the necessary procedures to organize the process of assimilation of the theoretical-cognitive information;
8) abstracts and special sections, which systematize and integrate the teaching material;
9) the special elements of a text that serve to consolidate and even generalize repetition of teaching material.
The complementary texts are those whose main function is to reinforce and deepen the postulates of the basic text; its elements are:
1) documents;
2) anthological materials;
3) fragments of scientific-popular literature and memories;
4) literary descriptions and narratives;
5) notes or calls;
6) bibliographical and scientific information;
7) statistical summaries, including tables;
8) all sorts of lists, relationships, principal detailed features of phenomena and concepts which give a general picture of events;
9) supplementary information materials (beyond the curriculum frameworks).
The explanatory text whose main function is to serve the comprehension and complete assimilation of the teaching material allowing the organization and realization of the independent cognitive activity of the students has as elements:
1) introduction to the textbook or its different parts and chapters;
2) observations, notes and clarifications;
3) glossaries;
4) alphabets;
5) indices;
6) different types of graphic illustrations;
7) elements and summaries of norms;
8) index (relation) of the conventional signs adopted in a given sphere of knowledge;
9) Index of abbreviations used in the book.
2.4 Characteristics of English textbooks
Not every book that has been used in school is a "school handbook" in the strict sense. It is only those works that are specifically conceived with the intention of being used in the teaching-learning process, an intention indicated by its title, its subject, level or modality, its internal didactic structure, and its content, sequence of a school discipline.
The main characteristics that an English textbook contains in a strict sense would be: intentionality on the part of the author, systematicity, in the exhibition of the contents, sequentiality, adequacy for the pedagogical work, expository text style, text and illustrations combination, content regulation, their extension and the treatment of them and state administrative and political intervention.
The apparent simplicity of English textbooks often obscures a complex series of interventions, whether personal, institutional, technological or business. The contents and their organization usually respond to previous normative regulations, exposed in curricula and programs that conform the so-called "prescribed curriculum", of more or less obligatory fulfilment.
Regarding the English textbook, a socializing factor of first importance, may have been the type of written text that for a longer time was exposed to state control and prior censorship of its contents. As support for knowledge, it imposes a distribution and hierarchy of knowledge and contributes to forming the intellectual armour of students. As an instrument of power, the English textbook contributes to linguistic uniformity, to cultural levelling and to the propagation of dominant ideas.
The English textbook is in many ways the true manifest curriculum of the school, which the school truly teaches, being the most used teaching resource in practically all educational systems. The school texts, being one of the most characteristic products of the school institution, have become an object of study of great interest, as testimonies that can reveal aspects that until now have been neglected or opaque, whether related to the inner life of the school institution or about the ideological influences and political motivations that gravitated over disciplines and curricular contents. Through them, the English textbook intends to recover and analyze also pedagogical theories and methodological principles, both those that were predominant and had massive diffusion in determined periods and countries, as innovative pedagogical experiences or reformist, minority or individual ones. English textbooks offer a very rich material for the analysis of the different social and political conceptions that influenced its elaboration. They were shaped by the different ideologies and currents of thought that happened in the course of history, but above all contain the most outlined expressions of the dominant ideas in each epoch. They are not a description or a photographic record of that society and culture, but they express, rather, an idealized horizon of knowledge, purposes and valuations, a set of interpretations and positions that express subjective visions of the social world, susceptible, in turn of being analyzed to try to understand the school history and the processes of culture transmission.
2.5 Post 1989 EFL textbooks in Romania
Textbooks represent in Romania one of the most faithful allies for the teaching of foreign languages. Whether the "authoritarian" knowledge imposed by the textbook, the method proposed, or sometimes the lack of confidence that some teachers show when it comes to discerning the grammatically correct from the wrong, the truth is that the textbook supposes an unconditional support both for the teachers – because they focus their disciplinary knowledge around certain subjects while saving in time and resources – as for the students – because it gives them a global vision of the language as well as an organization of content adapted to a level.
In a context of non-immersion, where neither teachers nor students have access to the language being studied, students' learning needs and preferences must prioritize according to the cultural time of the moment. In order to meet this requirement, publishers renew their educational publications in successive editions of both prestigious series of manuals and emerging materials that arise through new technologies and try to meet those needs. These include activities or online exercises of all kinds to practice grammar, vocabulary, prepositions, connectors, listening, etc .; Open resources such as dictionaries, thesauri or translators, as well as interactive games for didactic or linguistic purposes. Due to these factors, simultaneous editions appear more and more frequently given the rapidity and constant change of the environment.
Therefore, a textbook capable of combining content to the level required by educational standards, thematic attractive to the target audience, effective methodology, topical and functional but captivating design will have the basic ingredients of an exceptional cocktail.
Diachronic Perspective
The textbook as main teaching material in the foreign language class has gone through different phases almost always connected to the teaching methodology of the avant-garde in each era. In this respect, in order to describe the historical perspective of the textbook, it is necessary to speak about the different trends in language teaching. One of the first methods to learn a foreign language is the traditional approach that was developed especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This method was governed by the teaching of grammatical rules, translation, and took literary texts only as support. Therefore, the manuals used at this time constituted relatively thick volumes, given the expansion of each literary text; they hardly had images, graphics or tables, and colour, in most cases, was not part of them. Opposing this methodology, the direct method later appeared, in which it was intended that all instruction of the language be made in the foreign language. Within this method, the inference of meaning given a context became the most developed skill. The manuals during this period promoted the use of the target language, including, for example, exercises to identify the words of a sentence according to its grammatical category – verb, noun – or vocabulary exercises according to its definition. The methods described above – a traditional and direct approach – lacked oral production in the foreign language. Trying to save this criticism and given the boom in cassettes and VHS tapes, the audio-lingual method emerged. The textbooks with this educational approach included complementary auditory material – with repetitive activities – and visual, with activities to develop before and after the visualization of the content. The opinion of the experts was positive for the innovation, although it is possible to emphasize that the productions contained very controlled language being unnatural and the context of the communicative situations that presented was not very representative of the reality, when showing only a social class considered an exemplary model of good communication. The result was that students had difficulty transferring what they learned to their communicative needs from everyday life.
As a consequence, the communicative method emerged – one of the most used in current textbooks -, whose objective is to teach the functional language necessary for daily communication. It is based, above all, on promoting the use of the language by creating communicative situations where the student needs to practice the language both on an oral level – listening and speaking – and on a written level – reading and writing. This method attempts to encompass all aspects of language by providing a holistic approach to it. With the advent of the digital age, a considerable amount of additional material supplements each manual. In addition to videos from different parts of the world to cover various accents of the foreign language, the manuals usually include activities whose development is done through the computer being very numerous games, but also links to online resources such as dictionaries, websites for Expand the content studied in the manual, or practical activities to review vocabulary, grammar, or even resources to improve pronunciation or writing in the foreign language. It is now becoming the main adversary of these manuals the time limitation to be able to cover all the contents provided.
English Vocabulary Profile
Firstly, the English Vocabulary Profile is characterized by being a database that allows to verify the level of dominance of a word according to its meaning. It is an initiative supported by the Council of Europe and based on two corpus of data: Cambridge Learner Corpus and Cambridge English Corpus. The first one collects data from official exams written by students of English as a foreign language worldwide, as well as lists of vocabulary for exams and materials for the class. The second includes oral and written data of current native speakers. The main feature of the English Vocabulary Profile is that it shows what students know, not what they should know. This fact is important since the difference between the knowledge demanded by the official standards and the true reality of the student's learning are sometimes very distant. Hence it is necessary to verify that the subjects proposed by textbooks at a given level correspond to the actual level of learning.
Bloom Taxonomy
Bloom's taxonomy (1956) exposes a cognitive scale on six levels of information processing as required by the complexity of the type of skill demanded. This scale has a hierarchical relationship because each level is assimilated by the next, and successively. The levels included in the scale are: knowledge, understanding, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. The scale also divides between Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) and Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS). The first three levels correspond to the lower order skills – knowledge, understanding and application – while the remaining three correspond to higher order skills – analysis, synthesis and evaluation. The scale was later revised by Anderson et al. (2001) including two fundamental changes: the passage from nouns to verbs in the denomination of scale levels, and the change in the order of the last two levels. The taxonomy was as follows: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create. Since the verbal form is easier to identify in the statement provided by textbook exercises and activities, the revised taxonomy is used in the study to classify the cognitive complexity of such tasks. The division between lower and upper order skills is reflected in the way of expressing the statement of the activity to be developed.
Principles of visual composition
The theory of visual composition, developed by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), is based on the concept of multimodality, which considers interaction in various ways – such as texts, images or exercises within a textbook – to create an integrated meaning. The theory of visual composition consists of three principles: the value of information, prominence and framing. Within the principle of information value there are three axes around which information will be represented: the horizontal axis, the vertical axis and the centre-periphery binomial. The first one distributes the elements of a visual composition – for example, a page of a textbook, either digitally or in paper – in columns. The items on the left will be the information already known, while those on the right correspond to the new information. The vertical axis has the elements at the top, forming the ideal information, and at the bottom, representing the real information. The authors of the theory emphasize that "tasks or exercises in textbooks are usually found in the bottom section of a page". The fundamental reason is that the exercises represent for the student the reality, that which he is asked to perform. Finally, the centre-periphery distribution places one or several elements in a centre, granting them the highest prominence of the composition and the rest of elements to its surroundings, in the margins. According to the authors, there is a "relatively low frequency of centre-periphery compositions in contemporary Western culture", therefore no patterns of this distribution are expected in the selected samples.
The second principle of visual composition theory is prominence, which involves prioritizing one element above the others. Kress and van Leeuwen define five major factors, including culture, which influence prominence: size, focus definition, contrast of tone, colour contrast, and perspective. Finally, the third principle of the visual composition is the framing, which indicates the continuity or discontinuity of the elements of a composition. In general, there are two resources to mark that continuity or discontinuity: the boxes and the vectors. The function of the first is to separate some element, either to highlight the element in question or to isolate some information that is not directly related to the main theme of the composition. In addition, if a box is heavily marked, it will intensify that discontinuity. The function of the vectors is to direct the reader's gaze towards certain elements of the composition. Vectors can be explicit, represented as lines, or implicit, represented in absentia.
Once defined the concepts of visual composition, it should be noted that in the same composition it is not necessary to appear all the elements mentioned above. Moreover, in most compositions one distribution predominates over the other, or there is a combination of some of them. Therefore, it is necessary an adaptation by the reader to each visual composition.
Components of Post 1989 textbooks
The textbook involves two components: texts and extra textual components. The texts include the knowledge and activities that must be assimilated by the students; the extra textual components have the function to organize the assimilation of the content of teaching and facilitate its understanding and practical use. Both textbooks and extra textual components occupy a place close to the cusp. The cognitive-theoreticians have as their dominant function the presentation of the information. Its contents are:
1) the main terms and the language of a specific sphere of scientific knowledge that represents a given teaching subject;
2) key concepts and their definitions;
3) the main facts;
4) the characteristics of fundamental laws, regularities and their consequences;
5) the reflection of the main theories;
6) the characteristics of the development of the guiding ideas and of the directions perspectives in a certain branch of knowledge;
7) the basic materials to form an emotional-axiological attitude to the world;
8) generalizations and ideological assessments and about the conception of the world;
9) the conclusions and the summary. The practical-instrumental texts play a predominantly transformative role (application of knowledge) and its contents are:
the characteristics of the methods of activity necessary to assimilate the teaching material and independently obtain the knowledge;
the characteristics of the principles and rules of application of knowledge;
the characteristics of the fundamental methods of knowledge in a given branch of knowledge, including applied methods;
the description of the tasks, exercises, experiences, experiments and situations necessary to deduce the rules and generalities to assimilate the theoretical-cognitive information;
the elaboration of the set of exercises, tasks, experiments and independent works necessary to form the complex of basic skills;
the characteristics of the ideological, moral and aesthetic standards necessary for activity in a given sphere;
the characteristics of the logical operations and of the necessary procedures to organize the process of assimilation of the theoretical-cognitive information;
abstracts and special sections, which systematize and integrate the teaching material;
the special elements of a text that serve to consolidate and even generalize repetition of teaching material.
The complementary texts are those whose main function is to reinforce and deepen the postulates of the basic text; its elements are:
1) documents;
2) anthological materials;
3) fragments of scientific-popular literature and memories;
4) literary descriptions and narratives;
5) notes or calls;
6) bibliographical and scientific information;
7) statistical summaries, including tables;
(8) all sorts of lists, relationships, principal detailed features of phenomena and concepts which give a general picture of events;
9) supplementary information materials (beyond the curriculum frameworks).
The explanatory text whose main function is to serve the comprehension and complete assimilation of the teaching material allowing the organization and realization of the independent cognitive activity of the students. It has as elements:
1) introduction to the textbook or its different parts and chapters;
2) observations, notes and clarifications;
3) glossaries;
4) alphabets;
5) indices;
6) feet maps, diagrams, charts, diagrams, graphs and other types of graphic illustrations;
7) tables of formulas, systems of units, coefficients, elements and summaries of norms;
8) index (relation) of the conventional signs adopted in a given sphere of knowledge;
9) Index of abbreviations used in the textbook.
Textual production
1) Oral texts: Intonation and articulation include: Mental procedures (classification, hierarchy, comparison, definition, analysis, synthesis, part-whole, cause-consequence, problem-solution); Structure, lexical level, aesthetic sense and context of texts; the clear and sure expression, significant competence, textual production, logical relations in discourse, cognitive processes, symbolic and cultural exchanges, communication, interaction, conception of language, meaning and communication, communicative skills
2) Written texts: Strategies for its elaboration; Relations between thought, language and reality; Textual plans (prewriting); Mental procedures; Structure, lexicon, aesthetic sense and context of texts; Search, organize and store information; Textual competence, textual production, logical relations in discourse, cognitive processes, descriptive text.
Textual interpretation includes: strategies for searching, organizing and storing information; means of mass communication and selection of the information they emit, to be used in the creation of texts; various interpretations of the same text or communicative act, based on hypotheses of understanding and on symbolic, ideological, cultural or encyclopaedic competences; semantic and syntactic structures; logical relations between the units of meaning of texts and those of communicative acts; textual mechanisms for coherence and cohesion; similarities and differences between the types of texts and communicative acts, in meanings, structures and contexts.
Aesthetics of language includes: characterization of the operation of some nonverbal codes; relationship between literature and education.
Other symbolic systems include: Elaboration of reading hypotheses about the relations between the constituent elements of a literary text and between this and the context.
Ethics of communication include: knowledge and analysis of the elements, roles, relationships and basic rules of communication, to infer; interpretation., selection and use of information emitted by the media; the intentions of the participants in communicative acts; the basic rules of communicative acts; cultural productions of the community and their social function.
Basic practical– instrumental texts include: presentation of elements that help organize, synthesize or relate information; proposition of learning activities and ways of identifying learning achievements.
Apparatus for the organization of assimilation- it is proposed to organize the work of the study material by articulating it, as appropriate, to the following axes: processes of construction of systems of signification; processes of interpretation and production of texts; cultural and aesthetic processes associated with language: the role of literature; principles of interaction and cultural processes associated with the ethics of communication; processes of thought development. Likewise, the direction of work by projects and the evaluation of learning by processes are indicated, indicating the categories for the analysis of reading comprehension and for the analysis of written texts in the context of evaluation. Also, it includes the need to work the text as a unit of analysis and, from there, to approach minor elements (sentence, word, syllable, spelling) to construct new texts, of the treatment of situations problematic integrally and with diverse optics; the proposal of communicative activities and activities to discover the purposes and purposes of writing; the presentation of multiple and attractive approaches to literary texts.
Illustrative material includes use of readable letter, adequate distribution of spaces; presentation of clear and student-like illustrations, well printed, well distributed. illustrative material attractive; motivating and driving force.
Orientation device includes: Presentation of the authors and their biographical reviews; the year of copyright and ISBN registration; the table of contents; information on the names of the evaluating team and the investigators who tested the text; clear structure; bibliography consulted and recommended.
CHAPTER III. EVALUATING THE ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS
3.1 Development
The panorama of the language teaching of the last decades is characterized by the progressive implantation of the new technologies in the classroom. However, it is undeniable that the textbook continues to occupy a predominant place in everyday teaching practice. Its popularity lies in its usefulness to teachers and pupils; to the first, the book provides a set of materials difficult to be replaced without a great investment of time and money; the second gives him an overview of the subject, and allows him to prepare and review classes.
In relation to the learning and teaching English language, the English textbook reflects a vision of the language and culture of its speakers and a certain teaching approach that can influence positively or negatively in the learning of that language by part of the students.
With regard to the assessment of materials for learning and teaching of non-maternal languages, we can bring together different research trends:
evaluations of curriculum design ;
the creation of models for the analysis of textbooks and teaching materials;
analysis of courses for English self-learning;
large-scale assessments of language learning and teaching materials;
small- scale analysis of some aspects of textbooks, and of different materials;
For example, in relation to textbooks, we find an analysis of vocabulary, speech acts, reading activities , sexism and transverse themes.
As a document of utmost importance in fleshing out the contents of education, textbook are specific to a series of functions listed and analyzed by several authors. For example, Nicola I., addressing this issue believes that the main functions of the English textbooks are:
information function justified by the fact that every textbook is an important source of knowledge for students; perhaps 70-80% of the knowledge acquired by them in the teaching-learning originated in this document, while a much smaller percentage teacher comes on the channel or means of mass communication;
formative function, explained by because of the operand contents develop students a range of intellectual work skills, develop their operators structures adapted to different types of content, they can become familiar with a series of algorithms that apply to certain categories of documents;
stimulating function is explicable in terms of English textbook’s quality can enhance student motivation for learning-training activity, can stimulate curiosity, interests and concerns may widen to know;
self-assessment function because textbook self-education can prepare students for helping to form an individual work style thanks to whom the future can acquire a range of knowledge and information through personal effort.
Another author, R. Seguin referring to the English textbook’s functions considered that among the most important are:
1) information function
Select knowledge must be made in order to avoid overloading;
when selection is done, knowledge must bear in mind certain reductions, simplifications, reorganizations.
2) structuring the learning function. Learning can be done in several ways:
from practical experience to theory;
from theory to practical applications by controlling acquisitions;
from practical exercises in developing the theory;
from exposure to examples, the illustrations;
from examples and illustrations to observation and analysis.
3) guiding the learning function which can be achieved by:
repetition, memorizing, imitating patterns;
opened and creative activities of students who can use their experiences and observations.
To successfully fulfil the functions of the specific textbook must honour a number of requirements which are grouped into three categories, namely:
a) Requirements of psycho-pedagogical nature of the observance which require that the textbook knowledge and information is presented so that students can assimilate, understand and apply it;
b) Requirements regarding the quality of paper and printing ink, text readability and so on;
c) Aesthetic requirements (quality illustrations used to-drafting, binding and so on.).
If, as we have previously shown there have been advances in recent decades both in curriculum development and in designing the syllabi, it was normal for textbooks to benefit of the same attention and thus to introduce innovations in their development.
This was accomplished and is currently the most notable innovation focused on the one hand, on the development of special textbooks for teachers and special textbooks for students and on the other hand, the development of alternative textbooks for the same discipline that is taught by a class or education level.
Developing special English textbooks for teachers and students is a win, because each of them is related somewhat different from this tool that materializes contents of the educational process. For example, textbook teacher or teacher's book is distinguished primarily in that it includes a larger amount of knowledge and information, and this is natural because the teacher must have a surplus of knowledge and information that appeal only in cases namely special when students face some misunderstandings, or when ask about a theme or topic, more examples and more embodiments. Also, the English textbook for teachers includes a number of methodological indications about the way they have to teach certain content.
Teacher's textbook includes types of exercises and problems that students must solve in order to demonstrate the degree of understanding of the contents that were the subject of training activity.
Regarding the textbook for students, it is distinguished primarily by lower volume of knowledge and information with a variety of larger exercises and problems that students will have to solve them by including independent work sheets and instruments through which students can assess themselves.
The second major innovation in the field of published textbooks is the alternative to the same discipline that through a certain education level. This innovation is productive and it can be easily justified in terms of psycho-pedagogical if we start from the premise that, since students are different between them both by cognitive, affective, motivational potential, then it seems natural that the textbooks for them to be different and to be designed so that it can be made compatible with certain categories of students.
For example, a student with greater possibilities for discipline, better motivated, it could opt for a more elaborate and sophisticated textbook that corresponds to a greater extent to its psychological characteristics; on the contrary, a pupil less equipped and less motivated to a certain discipline can opt for a textbook better illustrated, less complicated, that it favours and it advantages him to solve problems or specific activities at that discipline.
On the other hand, one must clearly indicate the alternative that textbooks prove their effectiveness as long as it still provides training unit, students in the same discipline, which means that each version of the textbook should provide the core of the discipline, and the differentiation between variants to refer mainly to the presentation of contents, iconographic material and the variety of exercises proposed to the students. If this requirement is not respected some variants of textbook effectively penalize students who opt for them.
If the curriculum, syllabus, textbook are the main documents that materializes contents of the educational process, one must not forget that there are other curricular supports which have a negligible role, such as monographs on certain topics, journals, collections and chrestomathies, atlases and albums, educational software, tape, which can be appealed in certain contexts training to overload students, but to make them more effective and enjoyable learning.
Since ancient times, people have tried to find a method to make life easier. Thus, whether made tools to build a home or that hunted to eat, they themselves initiated activities to satisfy basic of needs. Today, however, with the evolution of society, the same man who once was building a house and hunt to survive, is the one who discovered that in education, regardless of age, plays a special role textbook. So the question arises: Is it true that the textbook is a creation that serves no purpose for which it was designed – to educate, shape, help?
The textbook is an official document that provides curriculum concretization in a form that relate to the knowledge and skills systemically through various teaching units, operationalized and structured chapters, subchapters, group lessons, learning sequences.
The first argument in favour of the idea that by following content is reached to educate stems from the fact that any textbook highlights the system of knowledge and skills fundamental to the field of study concerned, this means teaching appropriate images, diagrams, drawings, photos, symbols.
Moreover, any textbook reflects the benchmarks and skills in the school curriculum and guidelines, theories, standards and conventions in relation to which they are presented, explained and applied contents reflect the recent acquisitions of the domain in the school curriculum. Thus, students are given the possibility of receiving, as actual images about the world and avoid some stereotypes formed as a result of seclusion in obsolete structures – elements that help also in a good and lasting education students.
All of the educational function of the school textbook links and the idea that the concepts of structure content of any textbook are presented, interpreted and applied in accordance with the meanings and scientific principles, accompanied by alternatives for interpretation, which indicates the opening it propose any textbook, within the maintenance purpose for which it was proposed. For example, textbooks of English language and literature does not provide unique solutions to solve the items, but encourages both students and coordinators discipline to propose alternatives for interpretation and resolution, in other words educates students, on the basis of theoretical principles and compliance, to adopt a personal point of view.
Another argument for the usefulness of school textbooks is that it acquire through its training function. This is closely related to the function of education previously mentioned, and refers to the stimulation of individual, independent and autonomous students. Textbook structure, complex or simple, provides models of inductive reasoning, deductive or analogue, to maintain its role of encouraging an open pedagogical project.
Another argument claims that English textbook achieves its purpose for which it was designed from the fact that it helps in two important ways: on the one hand, to stimulate the operations triggering activation and support attention and motivation of students and learning and, on the other hand, to stimulate internal mechanisms reverse connection, existing in teaching activities.
One possible option for evaluating the English textbook is to use a list that can be provided by the author. Experts generally present detailed listings and place special emphasis on important things such as methodology, language content, assessment, activities, book components and so on. Another good option is to make own lists according to what the school is looking for.
There are several things to keep in mind before selecting the English textbook. First, special attention must be paid to the type of students who are in school. It is important to know their age, their economic status and their educational level. It is necessary to know the policies of the school and its objectives so that the approach that supports the book fits into that learning community. It is also relevant to know the profile of English teachers. They must know their training in the area of language teaching, whether or not they have experience, if they have experience managing such students and so on. In addition one must know about the availability of equipment.
When evaluating the English textbooks, teachers must intervene because they are going to implement them in the classroom. Also, they should feel at ease with the book enhancing a careful review of it. However, it is generally the authorities who select the books and teachers are limited to use them even though the election does not seem appropriate. If teachers participate in the process it is easier for them to accept change in the institution. Publishing houses may also support selection because they are the ones who know the product best and can explain the approach on which the book is based in detail.
In each country, one of the strongest investments in education systems has always been to increase the percentage of literate population. However, contrasting the numbers of literate population with those of books read per inhabitant, we find that there is a significant poverty, because who knows how to read, does not. Reading grows the importance of textbooks.
For this reason, today there is an additional challenge to literacy, that of getting the literate population to become a reading population. This task is no longer an exclusive task of the school system; teachers, librarians, bookstores, publishers and, above all, parents should strive to make children capable of reading and becoming effective readers.
If this were not enough, the television and other media that mainly handle the information through images, have collaborated to give priority to the same image that uses a perceptive and concrete language, very simple to assimilate, in front of the word and the concepts, which involve a conceptual and abstract language and that require a creative process of thought.
For this reason it is very important to consider that having the different educational tools (books, CD-ROM, videos, Internet) within reach does not guarantee learning and acquiring knowledge and skills by itself, but the factor that makes them really useful and transcendent is the reading of its content; this is why developing the habit of reading in their children becomes one of the main qualities with which a person must count in order to successfully face the challenges of the world to come.
It is fundamental for parents to know all the benefits that reading provides and the conditions conducive to creating in their children the habit of reading:
• How to promote a positive attitude of people, especially children, towards reading.
• What family activities, type of readings and exercises make the development of the habit to be pleasant.
• How to fully and intelligently take advantage of technological tools.
The teaching- learning process reveals human components (teacher and students) and didactics that, according to Cunningsworth are the state components (the problem, the object, the objective, the content and the result) and the operational ones (the method, the means and the form).With regard to the environment, specialists from pointed out that it consists of images and representations of objects and phenomena that are elaborated for didactic purposes and also by the natural elements that are used as support for the teaching- learning process. The didactic means contribute to create the conditions for students to assimilate the contents of teaching at all levels that this activity implies. The authors mentioned that the methods and means are determined by the objective and the content and that it is up to the teacher to select the most effective methods and means for teaching the latter; also, they conclude that the means are classified in:
1) natural and industrial objects (live animals, machines);
2) printed objects (sheets, books);
3) sound and projection media (films, slides);
4) materials for programmed and control teaching (teaching machines, programmed teaching books).
The means of teaching English constitute a system characterized by ones as being artificial (created by the human being); inorganic (elements may be included or excluded without destroying their structure); opened and dynamic (undergoing constant changes and incorporating new elements). According to the above classification, the textbook belongs to the group of printed and printed objects; however, placing it in this class does not give enough information about its characteristics as a didactic medium that has historically developed.
3.2 Typological and didactic characterization
The textbook is a didactic means that reveals the general characteristics of the books and, in particular, those performing functions in the school environment. Every book contains content and its material support; one of the components of the content is the texts. Functional Design considers the texts taking into account their role in the communicative field; from this perspective, the approaches of Apple (2000) contributed in the conceptualization for the typological definition of the textbooks. This author considered that each of the five spheres of human activity corresponds to a functional style that bears the name of the respective sphere; thus, they pointed out the existence of five styles: the scientist, whose purpose is to account for the development of science, in fulfilment of its informative function; the officer who directs and regulates the performance of the members of the community, in carrying out his directive function; the publicity, with propaganda function and whose purpose is to convince of an idea or a system of ideas; the literary, of aesthetic function, through which the interlocutor is sought to be affected by the artistic images through which reality is recreated; the colloquial, used to establish everyday communication. With respect to the functional style, which is relevant for the characterization of textbooks, the commented authors indicated that it contains three sub-styles:
1) the proper scientist, whose genres are, among others, article, report, monograph and thesis;
2) that of scientific dissemination, through which scientific achievements are propagated and which, in addition to other genres, implies that of textbooks;
3) scientific-administrative underestimation among whose genres are scientific documentation, instructions and charters.
The author of this text considers that this classification makes it possible to identify the textual typologies in a more precise way, compared to other proposals, since it clearly contemplates the range of spheres of human activity, scope of existence of the texts, which, in both dynamic elements, can operate in different spheres. According to the approaches of Apple (2000), in the reference, it can be inferred that textbooks are a subgenus of school textbooks.
From the didactic point of view, the textbook was delimited by Wright (1976) as the one that:
1) specifies the orientations of the teaching plan;
2) gives the teacher additional suggestions essential for class planning and conduct;
3) aid to the enrichment of methodical instruments;
4) it transmits to the student fundamental knowledge, education and philosophical instruction;
5) presents summaries, questions, stimuli for independent work, impulses to thinking and problems to solve. In this same sense, the specialists defined the contemporary school textbook as: "A teaching book of masses, where the content of the subjects that form the teaching is explained and the types of activities that the school program is destined to be assimilated By the students, taking into account the particularities of their ages and others.”
To the difference between the scientific text and the didactic text refers to Igbaria and Assaly affirming that the contents of the disciplines: "they are reflected very differently in the teacher's consciousness than in the student's, and this is why the new pedagogy considers it necessary to differentiate the pedagogical exposition of science from its systematic exposition."
This conception of Igbaria and Assaly implies that the textbook manifests in its components two aspects: the disciplinary-didactic and the one of the writing. The first involves the content of the specific discipline that the student must assimilate and the didactic determinations regarding how to present the subject of study; the second enables the disciplinary and didactic determinations to be reflected in the book. Based on the above formulation emphasized as a characteristic element of the textbook, one reveals the principle of accessibility of knowledge in the teaching-learning process. The author pointed out that the textbook corresponds to the following didactic functions:
Informative. Presentation of all the information indicated by the program of the respective subject.
Transformer. In two senses: didactic re-elaboration of the contents; conversion of purely cognitive activity of students into transforming activity.
Systematizing. Exposition of the teaching material in a rigorous sequence systematized, so that the student dominates the procedures of the scientific systematization.
Consolidation and control. Contribution for the students to orient themselves in the acquired knowledge and to rely on it to realize the practical activity.
Self-preparation. Training students in the desire to learn and the ability to learn for themselves.
Integrator. It helps students to assimilate and select knowledge as a single whole.
Coordinator. Assurance of the most effective and functional use of all means of teaching and the use of mass media.
Developer and educator. Contribution to the active formation of the essential features of the harmonious and developed personality.
3.2 The analysis of the English textbooks
The analysis of the English textbooks was based on a quantitative content analysis grid and on a qualitative content analysis in which the extent and manner in which topics related to gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and disability, and the values embodied in manuscripts from the perspective of human rights education and diversity were captured. This analysis refers exclusively to the English textbooks for high school education1 approved by the Ministry of National Education and Scientific Research for the school year 2017-2018 and includes 8 of the 11 approved textbooks, which have Romanian authors. These are, in our order of analysis:
IXth grade
English Pathway to English. English My Love. Modern Language 1. Authors: Rada Bălan, Miruna Carianopol, Ștefan Colibaba, Cornelia Coșer, Veronica Focșeneanu, Vanda Stan, Rodica Vulcănescu. Didactic and Pedagogical Publishing, R.A .; Ministry of Education and Research. Scientific Researchers: Prof. univ. dr. Ștefan Avădanei, Univ. Al. I Cuza, Iași, Prof. Gr. 1 Mihaela Măroiu, "George Coșbuc" High School, Bucharest, Scientific Advisors: Rod Bartho, Intec, University College of St. Mark and St. John, Plymouth, UK, Sue Mohamed, freelance teacher trainer and writer, UK. Project Coordinators: Ruxandra Popovici, Ecaterina Comișel. Project Assistant: Mirela Ivan (English My Love IX, L1, EDP publishing house)
English Language Front Runner. Modern Language 2. Corinthian Publishing House. Authors: Ecaterina Comișel, Ileana Pîrvu. Scientific Researchers: Prof. univ. Ecaterina Popa, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. Prof. Bianca Popa, 1 st grade teacher, National Pedagogical College of Bucharest, national methodist and trainer. (Front runner 1 IX, L2, Corinth publishing house)
Xth grade
English Lesson English Front Runner 2. Modern Language 2. Corinth Publishing House. Authors: Ecaterina Comisel, Doina Milos, Ileana Pirvu. Scientific Researchers: Prof. univ. Ecaterina Popa, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca; Prof. Cristiana Faur, "George Coșbuc" bilingual High School in Bucharest, President of the Romanian Teachers Association. (Front runner 2 X, L2, Corinth publishing house)
XIth grade
English Textbook Front Runner 3. Modern Language 2. Corinth Publishing House. Authors Ecaterina Comisel, Doina Milos, Ileana Pirvu. Scientific Researchers: Prof. Univ. dr.Ecaterina Popa, Babeș Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca (Front runner 3 XI, L2, Corinth publishing house)
English Language- Pathway to English. English News & Views. Student's Book 11 + Activity Book 11. Oxford University Press 1998. Authors Bălan Council, Miruna Carianopol, Stephen Colibaba, Cornelia Coșer, Veronica Focseneanu, Vanda Stan, Rodica Vulcănescu. Consultancy: Rod Bolitho, INTEC, University College St. Mark and St. John, Plymouth, UK and Sue Mohamed, freelance writer and consultant, UK. Project Coordinators: Ruxandra Popovici, Ecaterina Comișel. Project Assistant: Mirela Ivan (English News and Views XI, L1, Oxford University Press)
XIIth grade
English Language Guide L1 Pathway to English. English Horizons. Student's Book 12. Authors Bălan Council, Miruna Carianopol, Ștefan Colibaba, Cornelia Coșer, Veronica Focșeneanu, Vanda Stan, Rodica Vulcănescu. Oxford University Press 1999. Consultancy: Rod Bolitho, INTEC, University College St. Mark and St. John, Plymouth, UK and Sue Mohamed, Freelance teacher trainer and writer. Project Coordinators: Ruxandra Popovici and Ecaterina Comișel. Project Assistant: Mirela Ivan (English Horizons XII, L1, Oxford University Press)
English Language L2 Front Runner 4. Corinth Publishing House. Authors: Ecaterina Comisel, Doina Milos, Ileana Pirvu. Scientific Researchers: Prof. univ. Ecaterina Popa, Babeș Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca; Prof. gr. 1 Anca Iliescu, methodologist, "George Coșbuc" National College, Bucharest. (Front runner 4 XII, L2, Corinth publishing house)
English language guide L1. Corinth Education Publishing House. Authors: Doina Milos, Roxana Marin. Scientific advisers: Prof. Gr. Ecaterina Comisel, National Bilingual College George Coșbuc, Bucharest, Prof. Gr. 1 Anca Iliescu, Methodist, Bucharest (English Language Textbook XII, L1, Corinth Publishing House)
What do the textbooks look like?
The lack of the English curriculum, in terms of integrative pedagogy, of any concern, of any allusions or topics of discussion about the situation of minorities of all kinds in Romania is obviously the result of some methodologies whose priorities have been left anchored in the "belt security "of the theme of the Anglo-American textbooks or the internationalist methodologies. Hence, paradoxically, the merits of thematic and imagistic imports that can become a standard for other disciplines, less attentive to the criteria of an intercultural democratic pedagogy. But also here we see the aggregation boundaries inherent in the era in which they were written; textbooks in which the only consubstantial elements with the pupil's position in Romania are some rhetorical insertions that unfortunately do not involve the author's systematic commitment to a local perspective on the minorities in our country. On the other hand, in terms of implementing concepts such as interpersonal, intercultural, social and civic competences and cultural awareness, cultural textbooks lead to excellence because in the name of language education, allow the import of ideas, texts and themes of reflection that originate in democratic cultures – English, American and British (post) colonial – to which these textbooks refer at first instance. Such amalgamations, implicitly implicit in the culture of globalization, deliberately or not fulfill a universal standard of contemporary high school pedagogy that we would like in the light of the European commitment of Romania, explained in the context of a human rights pedagogy with clear objectives.
In our view, it could be aggregated only at the scale of a local and national cultural perspective, where the choice of teaching bodies would explicitly refer to the life, status and problems of minorities of all kinds in Romania. It is obvious to us that de facto English leads the top of diversity education unparalleled, unfortunately, by disciplines such as civic education, remaining suspended in the historical horizon of the late 1990s, or religion, a discipline where the reality of the examples, not even does not meet the minimal virtues of a democratic methodology, mandatory to readjust urgently to questions of contemporary history.
1. English My Love IX, L1, EDP Publishing House
Written by a team of competent teachers, research assistants and international consultants, the book is more than just a textbook of linguistics, an exposition of the fundamentals of British culture – with the presentation of literary and historical fragments typical of English textbooks of culture and civilization, according to British methodologies. In the predominantly classicist approach of linguistic chapters based on "standard" subjects such as Hobbies, Music, Food, the recourse to traditional literary and historical registers appears as an indisputable merit of the authors, but by inconsistency and parity visible at the whole scale, and as a clear limitation of the book stakes to the curriculum specific to the textbooks, plus some elements of general culture that are needed for intercultural tourists. In other words, the textbook operates with clear limitations of pedagogical goals, which could have been and should have been avoided: from the systematization of the authors, both the criteria of politically correct approaches and the thematic elements of anti-discrimination education are lacking; we refer to prescriptions against gender stereotypes, approaches that would have been absolutely necessary in the logic of pro-globalization perspective proposed by even the collective of authors. We have a hybrid product in front of the cultural ambitions of the research team and the pragmatism of the "Globish" approach, where the themes and the vocabulary are written for their practical utility to the international tourist. English My Love, however meritorious in complex lexical insertions, has the appearance of a mimetic product of other similar British-style methodologies for the intermediate level speaker, pursuing and fulfilling pragmatic goals carefully – but without manifest concern for the ethics of communication or the explicit stakes of a democratic, anti-discrimination education. We are definitely in front of important pedagogical schemes, but most of all truncated or left in the "crocheting" stage.
2. Front runner 1 IX, L2, Corinth publishing house
A team of relevant researchers in other editorial staff unfortunately leaves the guard down, compiling a handbook from collages and pedagogical materials that seem somewhere gathered from tourist guides. We say tourist guide, because the entire textbook gives us the feeling of a kaleidoscope, thanks to the excessive recourse to cultural and pop-cultural glosses, without sufficient methodological foundations. Often, as in the imaging court on page 96, the absence of explanations leaves room for a clichéized representation of international tourism. The lack of photo legends can become a stereotype by not even taking care of detail, in this case of contexts appropriate to the lesson "The holiday of your dreams" (missing the caps in the title – mandatory in English, if it is titles); two other photo illustrations, one representing the Statue of Liberty, the other representing the photograph of a group of young people (with various racial traits) dancing on a beach, are left without any appropriate explanatory context, the student being asked just which places would choose to spend his vacation . We leave aside the aspect of social defiance and the pedagogical inabilities implicit in this approach – where the recipients of the lessons find it difficult to imagine their cultural and geographical destinations inaccessible to them – and remained unclear at the level of description of the images. But, returning to the critique of pedagogy, what could a fourteen-year-old student from Maramures or rural Dobrogea know about Garfunkel's, Picadilly Circus, Oriel College, Oxford, St. Petersburg? Paul's Cathedral or Queen Victoria's Memorial, so that they can engage in a competent English conversation with classmates about the aforementioned travel destinations? Or how could the same students choose between lunch menus such as "French onion soup", "Spanish omlette" or "Fish and Chips"? (p.28 – Fig.1) Here is a mosaic of all kinds of inadequacies without the authors' most preoccupation with the particularity, location, perspective or legend of the cultural context of the representations – had always been in the "sticker" stage – to read an overlap associated with the context of the lesson only in the corner of the expert reader.
3. Front runner 2 X, L2, Corinth publishing house
Surprisingly, innovating, the Front Runner 2 X introduces an important theme of the British democratic culture, namely the personality and work of English playwright John Osborne (1929-1994), featuring songs like "Look Back in Anger" back with anger -1956) or "The Entertainer" (1957). Surprise is legitimate if we take into account that in the Third Grade Runner's Textbook the authors remain (perhaps deliberately) far from any ethical perspective of the discourse, preferring a safer position of neutrality. Inserting the "Look Back in Anger" opening scene into the lesson plan, with a description of the characters that involved recourse to theoretical terms such as "direct description", "the eyes of another", or "self-revelation" through the eyes of the other, self-disclosure) is a novelty in the landscape of English textbooks. On page 28, in the Revision and Skills Development section, following a lesson about job interviews in London, the authors choose a list of key words and harmonious themes assembled for the potential foreign candidate at a job on the British market. From the authors' selection, there are no terms such as "patience, tolerance, ability to listen, ability to speak foreign languages", all typical of the contemporary multicultural communication model where the mention of opening to other styles of communication can not be avoided. In another section of the Handbook (3rd Unit, Black Cat), we are witnessing another spectacular methodical rhetoric and critical thinking, considered in other standard-system educational systems of democratic instruction. It is about introducing the notions of "Plot, Exposition, Complication, Climax, Resolution" specific to Academic Writing courses, where the discernment of the speaker (writer) is educated in association with the potential capacities of critical thinking , namely his abilities in communication, the understanding of the information received and ultimately the power of discerning the truth, either in aesthetic form – associated with the conventions of fiction or in the form of chronicle or memorization, where the rules of the story lay down the matter of factual truth (fictional narrative versus chronicling , memoir and reporting – fictive vs. chronic narration, memories, or report). Equally useful is the introduction of Criteria and Compliance exercises of the listener's words in conjunction with the text of the supplementary CD, which refers to fundamental communication situations (chronicles, reports, memories) and language situations where the article exceptions decided or the atypical plural is determinant for the language skills of the ESL 2 speaker.
4. Front runner 3 XI, L2, Corinth publishing house
There are literary and philosophical fragments, exercises, themes of reflection and moral accents in this textbook that outline the objectives of anti-discrimination pedagogy. In a considerable effort to adjust post-colonial, British or American methodologies, this text operates at maximum power with all the criteria proposed by our analysis, in a royal elegance of moral education and appropriate didactics applied to an economy of the force of creative pedagogy. The list of questions related to them is also appropriate to the anti-discriminatory ethical message proposed by and through some fragments of the literary literature of Nigerian prose writer Wole Soyinka. We therefore find, by virtue of the insertion in the text of an example of such weight, a tour of force against the philosophical determinisms of the pessimistic extraction and dualistic human condition present in the thinking of some English or German pre-modern philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Hegel or Nietzsche. Against reasoning of the neo-Protestant origins (to be read: Euococentric, rational-idealistic, imperialist and pro-colonial, typical of Hegelian idealism, or simply utilitarian – with all determinisms related to the pessimistic and quantitative vision of the human condition), Soyinka defines the individual, the family (tribal) and the community as inseparable. It explicitly denies the philosophical and historical philosophical and masterful philosophy of the "master-slave" model, whose hegemony postulated by Hegel makes a major dysfunction of the idea of emancipation; Soyinka (re) defines dignity (without forgetting the dialectics) as the aspiration of an emerging world (post-colonial Africa or segregated African-American communities) where the need for freedom is described as immanent, indestructible and, by extrapolation, inherent to the condition human – regardless of race or civilization, symbolically and historically codified as dominant patterns. The dignity of Soyinka expresses "an essence" resulting from the relationship with others – affirmed by the life of collective cultural memory, but also by the singular evocation of collective trauma: "when a being is labeled" slave "acquires dignity, he has already ceased to be a slave. "(when a being labeled as a slave gains its dignity, it ceased to be a slave.). On page 36, the lesson continues with the famous Conversation poem by the same author, and the exercise suggested to the student is a comparison between poem's ideas and text, equally important in Eleanor Roosevelt's Culture of Human Rights – "The Great Question" (1958) where the question "Where, after all, do universal rights begin?" Is addressed in a suite of arguments that are compatible with the perceptions of the Nigerian author. The vocabulary, as well as the new elements of rhetoric proposed to the student, along with the themes of discussion, draw attention to a particular "idiom" of contemporary English, namely the vocabulary (philosophical or literary but especially militant) associated with the rhetoric of human rights.
5. English News and Views XI, L1, Oxford University Press
This handbook is part of an original methodological series, with learning objectives inspired beyond the technicalities of grammar and vocabulary textbooks from the Rhetoric and Communication Sciences. These include knowing the grammar fundamentals and completing the basic modules with speech and writing culture elements specific to the advanced level. The selection of themes is an erudite one in which cultural suggestions go beyond the possibility of simple classifications in gender-based thematic determinations or in a thematic curriculum on human rights training. Although texts such as the Anthony and Cleopatra Shakespearens or The Tempest can also be read from the perspective of Gender or Postcolonial Studies – and certainly invite criticism to these interpretations, the author's methodological accent does not fall on political theories localized but rather the integration of all the linguistic, theoretical and critical linguistic skills necessary for an intellectual apparatus and a general culture appropriate to various communication situations in contemporary English. Thus, indirectly, even through the recourse to the rhetoric, the handbook provides important services to a methodological model with reference to topics such as gender, race or ethnic discrimination, a rather absent approach from other textbooks and methodologies whose attention has been given to the elements of anti-discrimination education could provide an extended space to applied chapters of general or pragmatic culture of communication. I extracted from the synopsis of the material table only those themes that are relevant in the economy of a pro-democracy teaching methodology, with the explicit presence of some subjects, textual insertions and presentation of important communication situations for assuming intellectual competences representing civic standards in a universe of globalization. Thus, each headline / subchapter title corresponds to several communication objectives and typical language situations:
Unit 2: Social Issues. "The World we live in," associated with the vocabulary fields "Civics, Social Work, Counseling, Animal Idioms, and introducing the rhetorical functions" Expressing agreement, Expressing reserve, Expressing disagreement "
Unit 3: Discoveries and Inventions, associated with the "Personality traits" and rhetoric "" Remembering, Forgetting, Reminding, and Giving Views (1) "
Unit 4: Arts, where the semantic fields related to aesthetics (artistic trends, words of French origin) correspond to the rhetorical functions "Giving opinions (2) – this time on themes of aesthetics and reception of the creative act.
Unit 5: "In the news", associated with the "Press terms", "Headlines, Personality traits" vocabularies, and related to the rhetorical functions of public discourse, curiosity, uncertainty, probability, expressing approval / relief; expressing indifference.
Unit 8: "The English Speaking World", associated with the vocabulary areas "countries, language characteristics and phenomena, common nouns derived from proper names, neologisms, false friends", language idioms, physical appearance "and related to the functions of literary or colloquial English. Describing people gives the pupil the opportunity to properly use the description rules when it comes to another person, including the visible differences of race or constitution among individuals. The final section crowns the whole methodological approach with a series of advice to the writer-student, where the do's and don'ts sections are followed by 'technical' pages, the purpose of which is to cultivate analytical virtues in a series of contexts where writing becomes equivalent Critical Ability: Writing About Plot, Writing About Character; Writing About Setting, and (perhaps most significant for the quality of a pedagogic target book in Diversity Education) Writing About Point of View, where there are detailed notions such as the perspectives of subjective narration or the omnisecient narrator. (pp. 190-191)
Again, we feel obliged to emphasize; the pedagogical method proposed by the co-authors of the Oxford edition is a synthetic and syncretic one at the level of thematic aggregation – one where the linguistic foundations are associated with a compulsory curriculum of subjects and moments from the history of Western culture. Such a pedagogical synthesis – updated in the version of the Romanian textbook with elements of modern national culture – becomes extremely useful for the student who is thus trained not only in the linguistic subtleties of the literary-philosophical text, but also in the critical strategies typical of contemporary thinking. This approach, also proposed by other authors of Romanian English textbooks, contains fundamental moments of cultural history and theories of thematic and ideological eloquence. These are specific to the Western Civilization and Culture and Values textbooks, and in the logic of the thematic convergence in the Oxford education system, the methodologies for high school announce the increased scale of teaching materials and elements in the university cycle, which in Romania appears for the time being as an unrealistic proposal. The profound knowledge of literary English does not become a target in itself, but a vehicle to be associated in the British educational system with the level of general-level compulsory education required by the Anglo-American academic system of any university student, regardless of the field of study. In a postcolonial world such as the UK, where the diversity of speakers covers vast cultural incompatible areas at the level of local mentality, the pedagogical stakes of such textbooks aim at defining a common sense in communication, including the elements of general culture and civic competence to be assumed as mandatory in such a globalizing perspective.
6. English Horizons XII, L1, Oxford University Press
The English Horizons textbook is the latest in a series of four, starting with English My Love, Perspectives on English, and English News and Views, the last three being for introductory study cycles. These are personalized variants for the Romanian student of the Oxford Educational Language Method, and its relevance can only be discussed in the context of the appropriateness of the method to the cognitive needs and educational standards assumed by the Ministry of Education on the basis of the European commitment. Thus, our quantification takes into account the change of paradigm related to the "officialization" of the Oxford method in contemporary Romanian education. The authors remain faithful to the Oxford method, with short adjustments related to the presence of exercises, especially retroversion – from Romanian to English, from modern Romanian literature and journalism. This pro-literary note is not a random one, since the whole textbook is aggregated as a Culture and Civilization, with English literature and essayistics modules corresponding to the advanced level linguistics and cultures related to the level of university competence in a British human faculty. Significantly, these modules of literary history are accompanied by narrative, rhetorical and written or oral lessons, including formal letters and rules of addressing; Oxford methodology devotes itself to sections of behavioral codes, Raising awareness of manipulation in language, and Awareness of gender stereotypes. In addition, the textbook brings to the forefront the notion of discourse, with all the nuances of the Rhetoric discipline. Some essential elements of the method implicitly related to the rules of democratic and civic education related speech would be:
1. the difference between public and private discourse, with examples of formal letters and types of professional jargon;
2. methods of capturing public attention, taking into account its specificity and the stakes of the communication document;
3. rules of eloquence in an academic lecture, but also reception rules, such as attention to the communicating experience. Also here are the justifications of the speaker's experience in formative stake communication, where the differential approach of the act of speech becomes equivalent to the context of understanding and the pedagogy of communication.
4. ways of composing responses based on audience attitudes (including silence interpretation);
5. Critical reception and self-assessment of debates, including the dynamics of dialogue between speakers with values, psychological perceptions or different cognitive priorities;
6. rules of cross-cultural awareness (Value theory) – so-called critical situations, where both humor and ambiguities become risky;
7. rules of composing truth in situations of confessional or objective narration, memorization, chronicle, and the special situation of literary texts, where the authenticity of the narrative is adjudged according to aesthetic conventions;
8. the rules of composition of oral speech, with the presentation of rhetorical pitfalls (a crucial element for democratic education, almost non-existent in other textbooks) and the discussion of some ethical notions of speech – and those essential to the drafting of a civic culture compendium – sincerity, honesty and frustration about taking responsibility for the relevance of public discourse.
7. Front runner 4 XII, L2, Corinth publishing house
In the attempt of the authors to reconcile fragments of democratic methodology with elements of pedagogy applied from conservative thinking, Front runner XII, L2, the Corinth publishing house remains a hybrid product, offering the student in search of values a dash of fashionable ideas. A lot of innovation, picked up with parsimony most of the time, but not equally valued. The "Privacy on the Internet" lesson, a text adapted to a BBC script titled I have a right (on pages 84-85), brings to the fore a relatively new ethical issue. Privacy on the Internet is a citizenship message lesson, inviting the Romanian student to reflect on innovative strategies to protect privacy on the web, when the democratic state does not actually do so, thereby violating an assumed obligation towards citizens 12th as fundamentally recorded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides "Right to privacy at home, family and correspondence". Thus, in the name of technologies that allow the surveillance and monitoring of personal data, it becomes gradually acceptable, serious derogations from rights in the name of national security. The proposed exercises are creative, introducing rhetorical elements of the public debate and giving students the chance to critically evaluate the theme introduced by the lesson (one of the points requires students to comment on the statement: "Right to privacy is a threat to national security" No matter how substantial these mentions are in a 12th grade textbook, extended to other textbooks – no matter what level, we would like the key themes of anti-discrimination education to find the right illustrations (to be broadly read – and as cognitive and expansion scales), perhaps in future editions on a scale of self-standing methodologies, reflected in autonomous lesson plans. In addition, in the UN Human Rights Committee workbook, The Lists of Issues reflect the whole list of human rights violations in the order of articles of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) / 1976) This is a source document for the fundamental freedoms of Human Rights and the invocation of a documentary-origin of European education policies in a methodological critique addressed to English textbooks is not just a whim, given that the EU education norms at which Romania has adhered to are consubstantial with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It would be possible to explain an intra-disciplinary methodological issue, namely whether English textbooks (… only so called) are or are required to be English culture textbooks or are / should be exempt from all the major implications of this affiliation in which the language lesson is brought to the reader by the "vehicles" of the British and American culture.
8. English Textbook XII, L1, Corinth Publishing House (Miloș-Marin)
The Miloș-Marin Handbook, which proposes revolutionary thematic and rhetorical standards for the idea of intercultural education, puts in a complex mosaic the various cliches, prejudices and language specificities existing in the world of English speakers, with the explicit and perfectly attainable aim at the pedagogical level varied stereotypes related to discriminatory subjects or tones in moral discourse about others, from cult text to juvenile colloquialism used in both the UK and America. Thus, the examples on page 15 in the Cultural Awareness section (Unit 1: Education on the Road) make it possible, for the first time in Romanian high school education, to debate the principles of intercultural education in terms of time and relevance of use. For example, exercise no. 4 invites the student to comment on a historical instance of women's education in a theatrical text by RB Sheridan ("I do not think so much learning becomes a young woman, for instance, I would never let her meddle with Greek or Hebrew, or algebra […] I would send her, at nine years old, to a boarding school, in order to learn a little ingenuity and artifice … ").
The text is related to the questions of the 18th century metaphysical feminism of the 18th century metaphysical feminism, and the exercise which requires the Romanian student to recognize the anachronistic ideological elements in the text is not only constructive but also inspired – in harmony with similar exercises in the rhetorical textbooks of advanced level in the Anglo-American academic world. Although explicitly unquantified among our indicators, the education of the Save the Planet, such as how to envision sustainable production and food, with the emphasis on present and future geopolitical zones, and the ways of organic production and consumption, enshrine the entire methodology of the Milos- Marin in an innovative pedagogical journey, with indisputable elements of democratic pedagogy, with possible intercultural applications by introducing articles of opinion extracted from the Anglo-American press, erudite both in stakes and in language. They reflect the stated intention of the authors of harmonizing the knowledge of younger generations to the era of communication on a planet whose population is about to reach nine billion, where cognitive priorities and the ethics of globalization will change the course of thought, communication and mentality. On pages 21-24, the textbook devotes an entire section to the ethical principles of volunteering. Without insisting on discriminatory courts, the section indirectly discusses the reasons and the justifiable stakes of volunteering campaigns, explaining the ways of enrollment and action in EVSE European Voluntary Service. On page 21, the authors post a text broadcast to Radio Romania International in September 2006, where young people are motivated to work for NGOs and charity foundations. In the accompanying illustrations, some typical volunteer activities are presented: mass for disadvantaged communities assured by youth effort, the fight against violence in schools, or conferences to promote responsible communities and ecological principles.
Although the subsequent box on the positive impact of EVS concerns the promotion of equal opportunities in the labor market for young Europeans, we believe that the lesson would have been more valuable if volunteer courts had added explicit sections on anti-discrimination education, xenophobia and xenophobic clutching strategies or gender education as outlined in the pedagogical norms of rhetorical textbooks in the Anglo-American world.
An integral openness of English language study methodology for years to the fundamentals of Critical Thinking and Academic Writing (shortly Writing and Reason, as it is known and taught in pre-university English colleges), with the emphasis on differences between the rules of colloquial speech and those of the expression "cults", with all the nuances of rigor regarding the conventions and rhetoric of the rhetoric, as well as the discussion of the technical and professional languages (Technical Idioms) would represent a major direction to be followed in the coming years – already opened here by the authors. When analyzing the Class 11 News and Views Textbook, we suggest that in the English rhetoric textbooks, the problem of correct addressing includes allusion to racist slang and unacceptable colloquialism – those with a xenophobic tinge. Therefore, anglic-conservative t-shirts can not be left isolated or willing in the examples of applied linguistics, because the Romanian student is not preparing to assume an island identity model, but on the contrary, to refine the counter-argumentative understanding at the philosophical clichés and philosophies of British imperial culture. From an ideal textbook and methodology for Romania, I suggested above, should not miss the rhetoric fundamentals taught as a positive art of discourse, as well as the counterpart of denouncing "The rhetorical fallacies". In other words, "rhetorical artifacts" have as implicit registers an entire glossary of manipulation of language with the intention of neon, persuasion or the ideology of the message relating to the pulsations of pleonasm, the rehearsal or, in logic, the vices of tautology. Exposing typical rhetorical abuse instances, as we have outlined, may provide significant support to a vision of the method where speech education is explicitly devoted to denouncing and preventing gender, race or ethnic segregation. This is an imperative target of democratic and pro-European education, to be imitated or to be followed in other textbooks or related methodologies – which would gain visibility in quality by giving self-contained sections of the notions of general culture – especially those originating in anti- and postcolonial writings.
The combination of fragments of militant literature with sections of pragmatics of communication and rhetoric is also advisable, as is the literature in the Reason and Writing textbooks. Last but not least, we want a group of methodologists mindful of the political stakes of education in the age of globalization, with distributive attention to the rules of speech, orality and writing aggregation – either in analysis or synthesis or in the critical commentary of "reality" especially in those instances where the act of reiterating becomes noticeable subjectivity. In other words, where confession is combined with irreconcilable cultural protests and perceptions. Such an assault on the easy internationalism of the Globish pedagogical visions – where English is taught as a non-binding language – would include as a sustainable alternative and proximity to national culture, bringing into the foreground some instance of cultural resistance from us, of which the voice of minorities in the national space should neither be missing nor prematurely lost in translation.
3.3 How the textbooks reflect the history
This subject is part of the block of subjects dedicated to the study of English linguistics (36 credits) integrated by the Morphosyntax of the English language; English phonetics and phonology; Syntax and semantics of the English language; Grammar and speech in English; History of the English language 1 and History of the English language 2. Together with the subject called History of the English language 2, it forms the diachronic axis of the linguistic block, whose main objective is to know the external and internal history of the English language with In order to establish connections with the different aspects of current English.
Goals
Introduce students to the study of the external history of the English language, from its beginnings, with the Germanic invasions, until the 21st century.
We will study the most relevant socio-historical changes, and we will see how these changes have influenced the internal history of the language.
To familiarize the students with original texts from different eras of the history of English, with the aim that the students acquire experience in the description and interpretation of linguistic data, as well as with the fundamental ideas about the language in said periods.
Encourage the use of rigorous linguistic terminology and adequate notation.
Familiarize students with the use of historical dictionaries, especially with the use of the Oxford English Dictionary as an indispensable work tool for the student of English language and literature.
Encourage discussion and teamwork through small tasks to be done in practical classes.
With the preparation of the exercises:
(i) the habits of study and individual work will be strengthened that will allow the student to achieve a progressive autonomy in their learning;
(ii) students will learn to handle various types of historical sources;
(iii) they will learn to manage their time and to work with deadlines for delivery.
The expository sessions will be supported by the hand-outs of the subject (available in the virtual platform with sufficient advance notice), and in power-point presentations. Since all the classrooms are equipped with computers and internet connection, in the lectures will be used material in computer support and online (e.g. presentation of online dictionaries). As far as possible, there will be interaction with the students in these classes with the aim of invigorating the sessions. In the interactive sessions various practical tasks will be carried out, such as, for example, the discussion of previously recommended readings; group exercises with their subsequent sharing; viewing of video clips on topics to work, etc. In the virtual classroom there are class work materials (hand-outs, exercises), as well as other additional material related to the subject (articles of specialized publications, articles of newspapers and magazines, videos). There will be two scheduled tutoring sessions: the first at the beginning of the semester and the second at the end of it. The first tutorial will introduce students to the use of a fundamental tool for the study of English historical linguistics, the Oxford English Dictionary and the second will be devoted to the practice of a mock exam. It is recommended that students go to personalized tutoring at least once in the semester.
In his essay entitled The History or the Reading of Time, Chartier reflects on the debates around history as a narrative, as a narrative, since the 1970s. This author highlights works such as those of Certeau, who put the accent in the discursive nature of history, and how this debate shook the foundations of history as a discipline. The duality between narrative and explanation has been questioned by Chartier, who believes – like Certau – that history is narrative, and that explanation is no more than a form of narrative. The textbook is probably the most widely read historical narrative by society as a whole, and perhaps the only story about history that is used throughout life along with other informal means of knowledge (mass media, museums, other centers). of historical interest, etc.).
This is why analysis of this narrative which has created so many controversies due to its use (and abuse) in the educational field, is so important. In England, despite the continuous legislative changes in education in recent years 25 years and the different methodological proposals in the teaching of history, the textbook continues to be the main teaching material used by teachers. Not all the countries in our environment have the same conception and use of the textbook. While in some countries the textbook is often used in the classroom to cover much of the content of the subject, as well as to prepare students for the exam, elsewhere is just another resource for both the teacher and the student. It is true that the textbook is an instrument of teaching and learning that has facilitated the work of the teacher and has acted as an intermediary between the student and the subject. Valls made a proposal that integrates a series of aspects: historiographical, communicative or epistemological , when establishing an evaluative analysis of school textbooks of History. This proposal complements the one that Rüsen already made, linking the functions of teaching history and the properties of textbooks. Without a doubt, and as indicated by Prats, the ideal textbook is the one that facilitates the learning of intellectual skills, the mastery of techniques and the construction of knowledge (methodology). In the case of history, without a doubt, the objective should be to train students in historical thinking. The reality is that textbooks fulfill a transmitting function of knowledge and the sense of hegemonic reality on the part of the authorities or the power that is not usually questioned in its pages. The textbook, as Foster indicates, is a powerful cultural artifact that contains ideas and values that the influential sectors of society expect students to learn and reproduce. Traditionally, the teaching of history has been considered as the vehicle through which nations seek to disseminate and reinforce the narratives that define the concepts of nation and national identity.
Textbooks contain many of the stories that nations choose to narrate the construction of their institutions, their legitimacy, their relations with other nations, and the history of their people. It is therefore key to analyze the construction of that story on the line proposed by Chartier, to understand the intentionality of the authorities and other agents of influence over the historical narrative that must be present in the classroom. Although it is also necessary to remember, as many authors indicate, that the contents shown by the textbooks are not reproduced literally by the teacher, nor the students assimilate them without processing them with their previous knowledge of the subject. This interaction between the student and historical matter is very influenced by the media and other informal sources of knowledge.
This concern for the role of textbooks in the teaching of history and its link to the construction of collective identities has produced a large literature in the international arena. A sample is the monographic issue of the International Journal of Historical Learning. Teaching and Research in 2003, the book coordinated by Foster and Crawford, or the monograph on this topic in the Educational Inquiry magazine in 2011 (vol.2, no.1). Authors such as Foster have made an interesting review of the theoretical and empirical approaches to the analysis of textbooks, and works such as those by Nicholls19 or Pingel20 have presented the main methods used in textbooks research. Although undoubtedly if we have to mention a reference work center on this topic, we have to name the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig (Germany). This center is one of the main research focuses on textbooks in the world with a large number of research projects that cover a considerable number of topics. The Georg Eckert Institute conducts a multidisciplinary research on textbooks, mainly for the teaching of history and social and cultural studies. The recent work of Elmersjö21 has emphasized one of the international projects carried out by the Georg Eckert Institute in collaboration with the Swedish universities of Umeå and Karlstad. This project has analyzed the changes in the teaching of history in Europe through the textbooks throughout the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century.
In Europe, therefore, the analysis of textbooks is a fundamental line of research to understand the tensions in the teaching of history, its problems and relations with power, curricula, the construction of identities and the historical, social context and cultural.The majority of these works have deepened on the construction of the concept of Europe, the presence of the great social and political traumas (First and Second World War, fascism, Nazism, etc.), the comparison between the different ways of focusing the nation, and the changes in the teaching of history that are visualized through the textbooks. A similar trajectory on this line of research has been developed in the USA, as shown by the works of Foster or Giordano.
In this context of bibliographic production, this study aims to provide a comparative vision of social representations and historiographic approaches in three key territories of Western Europe: England. This territory have had a great presence in other continents, and its linguistic and cultural influence worldwide is very remarkable. In addition, it is a territory that receive immigration, so the classrooms tend to look quite multicultural. Given these circumstances, the purpose has been to analyze what historiographic vision the textbooks present, and what social, national and non-national representations are hegemonic in their pages.
The intention is to try to know a reality: historiographical approaches and national and non-national social representations in textbooks from a comparative perspective. The analysis of the data has been done combining a quantitative and qualitative approach. The main investigations on historical education have also insisted on this complementarity of approaches. The techniques of quantitative analysis were applied in this work through frequencies, means and percentages of the categories that allowed it (table 1). The techniques of qualitative analysis have been carried out through a textual analysis, mainly on the construction of those social representations on national and non-national subjects. Qualitative analysis is a process that consists in "making sense" of textual information. The most recent and innovative research in didactics and, in general, in the social sciences, usually resort to this methodology. It is difficult in many cases to approach reality without the use of qualitative methods, since closing the possibilities of response can lead us to lose information that facilitates the understanding of the phenomenon studied.
Table 1. Categorization of data on historiographic approaches
Precisely the Annales inheritance is perceived in that parcelization that the textbooks make between political history, social history, economic history, thought, culture and art, in search of the ideal of total history. Following this influence, the textbooks raise the story from a essentially structuralist perspective. Although there is a pre-eminence of political and institutional history in the pages of textbooks, the influence of Annales has promoted since 1990 a greater balance with respect to other social, economic, cultural and artistic themes. Many of the themes are identified directly with the centuries that are going to develop (Europe of the Renaissance-sixteenth century, the Europe of the Baroque-sixteenth century …), and internally these issues are divided into different sections that develop topics such as the conceptualization of power; the trajectory of those institutions of power (internal politics, foreign policy, major battles and wars, as well as relevant political personalities); the structural division of society (in estates or classes, with a brief description of each); the explanation of growth or recession of the economy; cultural features; and artistic characteristics. The subjects of daily life have begun to be incorporated into the textbooks in recent years, although with a stereotyped, and still from a structuralist perspective.
It is true that there has been a notable improvement in the way in which the contents of Spanish textbooks have been shown since the end of the 1990s. The activities that have been introduced in recent years have been increasing their complexity, trying to escape the dominant linear discourse. As Schissler indicates, these changes are the product of a greater didactic concern on the part of publishers, what some call pedagogization of content. However, there is a great confusion between key competences – general, transversal – and historical skills – use of sources, work with causes and consequences, change and continuity, or historical relevance – . Thus, in the current textbooks, activities are combined. They seek to memorize the contents exposed in the text with exercises that want to develop other types of skills: synthesize, outline, summarize, search for information and -minoritarily- reflect. This type of skills is more related to the transversal competences proposed by the LOE and the LOMCE than with the historian's method. An exception is the book by Vicens Vives published in 2015 (for 1st of ESO, adapted to the new LOMCE regulations), in which there are fictitious case studies and a history workshop that show another way of showing knowledge historical).
The historical contents proposed by English textbooks have very different historiographical influences. To begin with, there are no topics on art history, while these topics occupy a very large space in textbooks. Very similar is the case of cultural issues. While in issues such as Humanism, the Counter-Reformation, the baroque mentality, the scientific revolution, etc. have an important weight in Europe , in England they hardly appear. Similarly, the social and economic history of structural type does not have a large presence in English textbooks. On the contrary, there is a large number of pages (about 40-45% of the entire textbook) dedicated to the history of everyday life, gender, the laws of the poor, conflict, clothing, housing, etc. Some very clear influences of history from below, microhistory, and the new historiographical currents that emerged after postmodernism.
There are many examples of this tendency. Thus, Collins' textbook for the first course of Key Stage 3, when addressing the peasantry of the Middle Ages, is done through this question "Were the medieval peasants stupid?" Through this question they analyze the point of view of the medieval peasantry, their skills and their work. As a counterpoint, the following dossier begins with another question: "Were the inhabitants of the city more intelligent than the peasants?" A clear manifestation of intentions that allows us to approach historical processes from reflection, and fleeing from clichés and stereotypes. Equally interesting is the dossier of Heinemann's book (History in Progress) for the same course when it investigates children and young people who had an important impact in the Middle Ages. It is usual in English textbooks to introduce themselves in biographies of characters (not always characters related to power) to deepen political, social or cultural issues. Also in the same book (Heinemann) when he addresses the nature of power in the medieval centuries he does so through a question "Who had the power: the Crown or the Church?". And that question works through several dossiers like "death in the cathedral", where he inquires about the death of the Archbishop of Caterbury (Thomas Becket) in 1170, as a manifestation of that Corona-Iglesia confrontation. Questions such as "Why were poor people in the Tudor era?" Or "What were the consequences for women of the industrial revolution?" Are the beginning of interesting topics addressed through pages of specific dossiers, images, documents of historians and texts of the time.
Undoubtedly, the important weight of social history in English historiography influences the presentation of these topics. There is a long tradition of interest in social history that dates back to the 1940s.44 Since 1970 there was a great development of research linked to this historiographical perspective. This development involved some historians related to the Marxist school, such as Rodney Hilton in the field of medieval history and the study of the peasantry; Christopher Hill and his work in the English Revolution of the seventeenth century; Eric Hobsbawm for the working class, the bourgeois revolutions and his last concern for other fields more linked to the new social history, and Edward P. Thompson and his contributions to the reflection on social history, revolution and class struggle. But there were also historians who promoted this social history influenced by other historiographical traditions more related to Max Weber, such as Harold Perkin, first university professor in England of Social History. The great debates in the British field on social and cultural history have placed the accent on ordinary people as engines of history. And this has been reflected very clearly in the textbooks. Unfortunately, the interesting historiographical debates in the Hispanic field have not been transposed into the field of textbooks.
3.4 Eurocentrism vs. anglocentrism
As is the case with historiographical influence, the contents and social representations on national and non-national subjects are very different in English textbooks with respect to other textbooks. The latter have a marked weight of Eurocentrism. About 40-50% of the topics proposed by different textbooks come from European themes, sometimes even more than the national subjects themselves. The English case is very different. Europe hardly appears in the textbooks before the eighteenth century, except sporadic brushstrokes. Practically all the subjects are British, and even more remote realities such as imperial China are being worked on more deeply, to give an example. Aslo, in the English textbooks there are no themes of the European Middle Ages that are not directly related. with its institutional or political trajectory. It is curious that in two of the textbooks analyzed does not appear the colonization and conquest of America by Spanish and Portuguese as a relevant issue.
This way of showing the historical contents is not only a consequence of the Anglocentrism of the English curriculum. English textbooks also have a very different way of conceiving historical time. Chronological time – the succession of events in the past is only the "crust" of social reality, a tool for situating historical facts, but it is not an end in itself. Braudel claimed that in all historical analysis phenomena of long, medium and short duration could be observed. These three temporal dimensions (structures, conjunctures and events) have been the basis of the narrative present in French and Spanish textbooks. Thus, to address any historical epoch, the Spanish and French textbooks propose a common structure: politics, population, society, economy, culture and art. These contents are usually framed in long-term lines (great historical periods: Middle Ages, Modern Age, etc.); in conjunctures based on an "average time" (periods and political and economic conjunctures of growth and recession or cultural periods: Renaissance, Baroque, etc.); and in a "short time" based mainly on the trajectory of the institutions of power (political events, battles, wars, etc.).
The fact of using these three temporal dimensions forces us to look for a supranational entity in which to frame those long-term processes. When other textbooks explain their political, economic or cultural conjunctures, they do so in the context of long-term European processes. Thus, before delving into national issues, textbooks address issues such as feudalism in Europe, the reaffirmation of the power of medieval monarchies against seigniorial power, the construction of authoritarian monarchies, absolutism, humanism in Europe, or the scientific revolution and its cultural and scientific consequences. These themes coincide in different textbooks, showing the national historical evolution in a framework of European construction. The temporal planes that English textbooks use to fit the historical narrative are very different. His proposals are more related to the different planes of historical time: chronology, duration, continuity / change and simultaneity. Whatever the organization of time that one wants to do, the chronological location, the duration, the elements of continuity / change and the aspects of simultaneity, with respect to other phenomena, form a consubstantial part of any historical content of a factual or conceptual nature. A certain historical event or phenomenon must be limited in terms of its relative duration.
Thus, English textbooks focus on key questions that tend to revolve around power (its nature, origin and development), society and daily life (forms of organization, conflict, social differences, gender issues). nero, etc.). These issues and questions focus on the English case, trying to respond to that definition of historical time (chronology, duration, change / continuity and simultaneity). They do not use any supranational entity that frames these historical processes. In addition, when they raise the temporal dimension of simultaneity they do so with other remote geographical realities, such as China, South Africa or the Kingdom of Mali. In fact, the great difference in the social representations and in the historical contents proposed by the English textbooks is in the narrative itself. The concern of textbooks is to combine this triple temporal framework (long, medium and short duration), so that the national narrative is framed in a coherent phenomena with the European construction. However, the purpose of the English textbooks is to answer these key questions. It does not matter so much to follow a structured time script. In fact, the chronological cuts do not coincide in any of the three editorials studied. The purpose of the narrative proposed by other English textbooks is more related to answering these key questions from different time levels (chronology, duration, change / continuity, simultaneity), and developing in the students concepts of second order and historical competences: work with sources and evidences, causal explanation, historical relevance, change and continuity, and historical argumentation. There is no doubt about the influence of authors like Ashby, Chapman, Cooper, Lee or Shelmit in this proposal.
CONCLUSIONS
After comparing historiographical influences and national and non-national issues in the textbooks, the results show some very interesting data on the construction of collective identities in each of the territories studied. The nation, as a subject, remains primordial in the textbooks of these three countries. However, the differences are significant. The marked weight of rankeano positivism in English textbooks affects a linear reading of the construction of the nation, while there are structural features -excessively stereotyped- of society and the economy. These two issues occupy a very secondary position, and the overwhelming weight of political and institutional history is only compensated by a greater role in the history of thought and art from a macro-structural perspective. The presence of daily life is very punctual and very superficial, with stereotyped archetypes. Society has a secondary weight in the process of nation-building, and the motor of history continues to be the event of reigns and political and artistic-cultural conjunctures. The historical contents are usually transmitted descriptively, encyclopedically and as a thought already constructed.
Knowledge is presented in an atomized, structural way, and in a support that is more like container-tight. Two of the textbooks present a more vivid history, although it shares some of the structural features present in the other ones. The presence of cultural themes (fashion, clothing, housing, gender, early concern for heritage, etc.), and cross-cutting issues (such as port cities or slavery) cause the story to escape the linearity of the textbooks. The nation remains the center of discourse, but the recourse to social issues of interest, case studies (London of the eighteenth century), the continued use of primary sources of the time (textual resources), texts of historians, and analysis of images of historical content, overcomes the monotony of textbooks. The historian's method has a greater presence in the pages of the textbooks through the analysis of sources from different sources (primary sources, texts of historians and illustrations). This brings them closer to the philosophy of Annales, as reflected in the words of Norton (2001): ”Every history book worthy of that name should include a chapter that would be titled more or less: How can I know what I am going to say? I am persuaded that, if these confessions were known, even readers who were not of the trade would find in them a true intellectual pleasure. The spectacle of the investigation, with its successes and failures, is almost never boring. What is finished is what distills heaviness and boredom.”
English textbooks present a great paradox. They are perhaps the textbooks that devote the most pages to their nation, ignoring the rest of Europe. However, at the same time, they are the ones that devote the most to society, moving away from the archetypal and stereotyped images that appear in other textbooks. They raise very interesting questions about historical problems. They work with texts of the time, texts of historians, and delve into the themes through the historian's trade. They perform case studies to make the students reflect on social issues, and also from a more up-to-date historiographical perspective than other textbooks (and much more updated than the French textbooks). However, the story that presents the construction of the English nation (especially in the centuries of the Middle Ages and Modern Age) is totally Anglocentric. While different textbooks propose this national construction within a European framework (of which they feel they are part of), in English ones they feel that process as alien to their own events. There is no doubt the influence of this circumstance on national feeling and the construction of collective identities.
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