CHAPTER 2. Communicative Language Teaching 35 Di erent investigations of modern coursebooks in the light of these criteria (Tomlinson et al., 2001; Masuhara & Tomlinson, 2008; Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2013; Tomlinson, 2013a, Tomlinson, 2016) have prompted Tomlinson to conclude that “global coursebooks were much more likely to help learners acquire knowledge of the language than an ability to use it for communication” (Tomlinson, 2016, p. 7). e general picture that results from these studies is one in which coursebooks and classroom practices, although in theory aiming at operationalizing a strong version of CLT with a focus on communicative competence, in practice only operationalize a weak version of CLT principles, with a strong focus on teaching (about) language structures. Based on his ndings, Tomlinson (2016) claims that, nowadays, educational publishers have a crucial in uence on foreign language teaching practice as they design coursebook units in accordance with the sequence of (1) language presentation, (2) language practice and (3) language testing, where language practice is usually operationalized by conventional exercises such as lling in the blanks, sentence completion, tense transformation, true/false statements, multiple choice etc. In Tomlinson’s view, these exercises “have no theoretical or research justi cation but (…) are easy to use and to mark and are expected by parents, administrators, teachers and students” (Tomlinson, 2016, p. 18). COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING IN THE NETHERLANDS In the previous sections, it has been argued that foreign language teachers around the world are unlikely to use strong versions of communicative language teaching approaches but generally adopt rather weak versions, with structure-based coursebooks at the heart of their programs. As the study that forms the basis of this dissertation is conducted in the Netherlands, it is important to see to what extent the ndings apply to foreign language teaching in the Netherlands. Popma (1997) and Hermans-Nymark (2006) concluded that, in general, commonly used CLT coursebooks for foreign language teaching in the Netherlands re ect a structure-based design. More recently, this nding emerged in a comparative study of coursebooks for German as a foreign language as they are used in a Dutch versus Finnish setting: the Dutch coursebooks followed a structure-based design, while Finnish coursebooks tended to follow more recent and newly gained (theoretical) insights (Tammenga et al., 2019). Although most coursebooks used in Dutch foreign language teaching programs claim to follow a communicative design inspired by the CLT approach and aim to develop communicative competence as advocated by di erent CLT proponents like Halliday (1970), Hymes (1972) and Widdowson (1978), a di erent picture emerges when these coursebooks are analyzed: e graded acquisition of selected structural and lexical items constitutes the backbone of these coursebooks,
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