Discussion of the results and interpretation

The hypotheses that are derived from the above research questions suppose that:

H1: The Spanish and the English coursebooks that are used in the first year of teaching these two languages in Slovene secondary schools contain intercultural contents, as IC is one of the written aims in Slovene EFL and SFL curriculum for secondary school.

Coursebook Knowledge descriptors

Skills descriptors Attitudes descriptors

TOTAL

Way Up Intermediate

364 (43%) 251 (29%) 241 (28%) 856

New Headway Intermediate

346 (39%) 273 (31%) 269 (30%) 888

Diverso 1 682 (48%) 337 (24%) 388 (28%) 1407

Gente Hoy 1 209 (41%) 142 (28%) 154 (31%) 505

Table 1 Representation of IC Elements in Terms of Three Resources of IC

As a means of examining the first hypothesis regarding the presence of IC in EFL and SFL coursebooks, all the tasks were analysed in terms of the three resources of IC: knowledge, skills and attitudes. The results presented in Table 1 have shown that in all activities of the four coursebooks a number of descriptors of all three resources of IC can be found. This signals that all the tasks contain all three features of interculturality and that, consequently, all four coursebooks contain intercultural contents. Consequently, we can confirm our hypothesis regarding the presence of IC. Provided that there are no other similar studies to this one, we, sadly, cannot compare our results with those acquired by other authors. What we can infer

45 from our findings is that they attest to a practical realization of the theoretic guidelines found in the Slovenian EFL and SFL curriculum for secondary schools that recommend intercultural communication as the ultimate aim of FL teaching and learning and can, as well, be interpreted as an alignment of the Slovenian intercultural strategy with the ultimate aim of the FREPA project (2012)—to promote pluralistic approaches in FL teaching and learning, among which we can count the intercultural approach. As coursebooks display a central teaching resource that has the power to exert influence on the manner in which a learner perceives the target culture (Sándorova 2016: 178-179), it is crucial that FL manuals contain IC contents. It is hoped that this attention given to the IC in the FL coursebooks will instil intercultural awareness in the learners and teach them how to conduct a respectful intercultural dialogue.

H2: The Spanish and the English coursebooks that are used in the first year of teaching these two languages in Slovene secondary schools do not balance the ratio of the three resources of IC—that is to say, knowledge, skills and attitudes.

With a view to discuss the second hypothesis about the balancing of the three resources of interculturality, all of the intercultural elements presented in each coursebook were analysed in terms of the three resources of IC: knowledge, skills and attitudes. By the same token, we focused on counting only the general descriptors, for example, K 1 Knows some of the principles of how languages work, while disregarding the subdescriptors, for instance K 1.1 Knows that language is/ languages are composed of signs which form a (semiological) system.

In the process of carrying out the quantitative analysis, we rounded fractional numbers to whole numbers, for example, a resource element percentage of 33,65 was written as 34%, while 43, 21 was written as 43%. The frequencies of the descriptors that belong to various resources found in each of the four coursebooks are displayed in Table 1.

As demonstrated in Table 1, all four coursebooks involve descriptors for knowledge, skills and attitudes. The frequency of the descriptors of resources found in Way Up Intermediate shows that the coursebook incorporates 364 descriptors (43%) for knowledge, 251 (29%) for skills and 241 (28%) for attitudes. Contents pertaining to knowledge strongly outnumber both skills and attitudes. The second most represented category are skills, while the frequency of the attitudes is the smallest, although they are only a percentage behind the skills. The coursebook, therefore, does not present a well-balanced ratio between knowledge, skills and attitudes, as the tide is in favour of knowledge.

46 The frequencies presented in the table above indicate a similar portrayal of IC resources for New Headway Intermediate, as the number of the descriptors associated with knowledge exceeds the skills and attitudes sections. A counting of IC resources shows a distinctive imbalance between the three types of resources. While the knowledge descriptors are represented 346 times (39%), skills and attitudes fall behind with 273 (31%) and 269 (30%) descriptors respectively. Once again, the frequency of the descriptors for skills does not differ markedly form the attitudes descriptors (there is only a one percentage variance).

The findings related to the content of Diverso 1 slightly differ from the results for Way Up Intermediate and New Headway Intermediate. While knowledge descriptors still appear with most frequency of 682 (48%) in the coursebook’s contents, the occurrence of attitudes is by 4% higher (388 descriptors for the total number) than the skills descriptors, which are represented 337 times (24%). However, the contents do show an asymmetry in knowledge descriptors from attitudes and skills and the frequency is, once again the highest for knowledge.

Knowledge descriptors also prevail in Gente Hoy 1, with 209 (41%) descriptors, and, similarly to its Spanish counterpart, knowledge is followed by attitudes with a frequency of 154 occurrences (31%), while the least represented category are skills with 142 (28%) frequency.

The results, again, point to a wide disparity between knowledge, on the one hand, and skills together with attitudes, on the other.

The overall coursebook material analysis indicates that the descriptors for knowledge completely dominate all four coursebooks. However, the occurrence of skills in EFL coursebooks is larger than those for attitudes, while the situation is vice versa in SFL coursebooks, where attitudes are more frequent than skills. The differences between the occurrence of skills and attitudes are in all four coursebooks, nevertheless, quite small.

If we return to our hypothesis, we can confirm our prediction that neither of the four coursebooks balances the ratio of the three resources of IC. Furthermore, our finding goes in line with Äijälä’s (2009), Níkleva’s (2012) and Xiao’s (2010) studies that attest to the strong predominance of the knowledge resource in secondary school FL coursebooks, the prevalence of which requires mere factual recalling (Ennis 1985, as cited in Sobkowiak 2016: 698-710).

This discovery should not come as a surprise, as out of the three components of the IC,

47 knowledge is the least challenging resource to incorporate for coursebooks designers and the safest option for teachers, who simply acquaintance learners with the five “F’s”, without challenging them to do a critical evaluation of the acquired concepts. However, superficial memorization of cultural facts does not suffice to acquire IC, as skills and attitudes are of equal or even greater importance—their development challenges learners to actively think about rather than just passively absorb a culture, which allows them to discover a culture on their own and to truly understand its mechanisms.

H3: Attitudes are the most neglected resource of IC in the two coursebooks, as it is generally known that attitudes are the most challenging resource to include in the learning tasks.

The findings displayed in Table 1 indicate that content regarding the attitudinal aspect of IC, indeed, appears least frequently in the EFL pair of coursebooks, as attitudes (28%) fall both behind knowledge (43%) and skills (29%) in Way Up Intermediate and in New Headway Intermediate, where the percentage of attitudes is slightly higher (30%), but it still does not outweigh knowledge (39%) or skills (31%), although it does come very close to skills. The findings related to the Spanish pair of coursebooks are, however, not in line with the English set of coursebooks. The occurrence of 28% shows that attitudes appear more frequently than skills (24%), but still do not exceed knowledge (48%) in Diverso 1. Its counterpart Gente Hoy 1 shows a similar picture, with attitudes (31%) being more thoroughly developed than skills (28%), but not more evolved than knowledge (41%). It can, thus, be concluded that although attitudes appear with almost the same small frequency than skills in the EFL coursebooks, they are still the most neglected aspect of IC. The same cannot be claimed for SFL coursebooks, as the ratio between the skills and attitudes frequency is more evident and is in favour of the attitudes, which are, then, the second least present resource of IC (they fall behind knowledge). The most neglected IC category in SFL coursebooks are—contrary to our initial prediction—skills.

Provided that the sample of the analysed coursebooks was larger, the results might be other for a different set of coursebooks; however, since any other study on the presence of attitudes in EFL and SFL secondary school coursebooks used in Slovenia is practically non-existent, we will generalize our conclusions to the whole collection of EFL and SFL coursebooks.

48 As far as EFL coursebooks are concerned, attitudes are, indeed, the most neglected resource of IC. It is interesting to compare our findings for New Headway Intermediate with those acquired by Rako (2015), as our results both showed a 30% frequency for attitudes, however, due to the author including additional criteria of (1) skills of interpreting and relating, (2) skills of discovery and interaction and (3) critical cultural awareness, her results showed an even lower percentage frequency for the three mentioned criteria, which addressed attitudes as the second largest dimension. If we added together those additional three frequencies that did not appear in our study, attitudes would appear, as in our work, the most neglected dimension.

If we refer back to some studies, Morain (1997, as cited in Dema and Moeller 2012: 79) and Celik and Erbay (2013: 347) explain that attitudes are the most abstract and the least visible aspect of IC, which makes their inclusion in the teaching materials rightfully (not to make an understatement) demanding. This provides a logical rationale behind the disregard of attitudes, but does, nevertheless, not justify this mistreatment. Attitudes are the starting and central point of IC and the gateway to successful intercultural interaction and should, as such, be the most prominent aspect of IC, if any. If learners do not acquire respect towards and acceptance of the other by means of a FL coursebook, then this responsibility falls on a teacher’s shoulders and it often happens that their burden is (understandably) too heavy.

Luckily, SFL coursebooks testify to some positive changes in terms of lack of attention to attitudes. The percentage of attitudes frequency is now high enough so that it surpasses the skills frequency, which is why we have to reject our initial hypothesis. We can suspect that this necessary change was brought about by the influence of the publication of the FREPA (2012), promoting the inclusion of IC in FL teaching-learning process, as the two coursebooks were published some years after this document was issued. The frequencies for attitudes are still not as high as one would desire, but are, nevertheless, at least encouraging.

H4: The Spanish textbooks include a larger amount of contents dedicated to developing attitudes as their English counterparts, as the Spanish set was published after the FREPA (2010) was issued, while the English pair of coursebooks was published before the launching of the Council of Europe's FREPA (2010) project, listing intercultural communication among the aims of English teaching and learning.

49 According to the results in Table 1, the set of SFL coursebooks does include a larger amount of contents dedicated to attitudes than the EFL pair of coursebooks. Nevertheless, if we, first, calculate the frequencies of attitudes for Diverso 1 and Gente Hoy 1, we get the average of 30% of attitudes in SFL coursebooks and the average of 29% of attitudes in EFL coursebooks, when we add together the frequencies for Way Up Intermediate (28%) and New Headway Intermediate (30%). The comparison of the frequencies of attitudes in SFL and EFL coursebooks reveals that there is only a one percent difference between the two sets. We can, therefore, conclude that the frequencies for attitudes do not evidence a marked difference overall and that the Spanish coursebooks include almost the same amount of attitudinal contents than their English counterparts.

While our prognosis of the EFL coursebooks used in the Slovenian secondary schools was on point, due to them being published before the FREPA (2012), we must, nonetheless, reject our hypothesis, as SFL coursebooks do not contain more attitudinal contents than the EFL coursebooks (the difference between both frequencies is negligible). It seems that the impact of the publication of the FREPA (2012) on the design of SFL coursebooks itself was not that large, after all. The FREPA’s message was also misheard by the Slovenian Ministry of Education, Science and Sport, who approved the use of these interculturally inappropriate coursebooks in Slovenia. While the reason for SLF coursebook designers failing to incorporate a fair amount of attitudes in their coursebooks remains unknown and unjustified, as, at least, in the case of Diverso 1 (2015) there was a span of three years between the launching of the FREPA (2012) and the publishing of the mentioned coursebook (this period was shorter by two years in case of Gente Hoy 1), the Ministry’s selection of such coursebooks might have a logical explanation. If we take a look back at when the proper, official intercultural formation of the Slovenian teachers actually began, we mentioned the year 2013 (Kač 2019: 11), when the coordinators of the FREPA project and the Slovenian teachers declared the intercultural approach as a welcome practice in the national educational setting. And it was only in 2014 that the first changes in FL teaching practice have become visible. The mentioned fact can, thus, perhaps, account for our professional linguists who work at the Ministry, confirming the use of intercultrally inadequate SFL coursebooks by the Slovene secondary school teachers, as up until, at least, 2014, they had not been adequately equipped with knowledge of pluralistic approaches to FL teaching and learning. However, as in the time of writing this thesis it is

50 already the year 2021, when the revised version of the CEFR—the Companion Volume (2020), describing the features of IC, has already been published, it would be necessary to update the coursebooks’ list with those manuals that are truly interculturally well-designed. Sadly, the reality does not provide this option, as, first, new SFL and EFL coursebooks are not published week in, second, some coursebooks do not treat IC properly and third, it takes time and professional expertise to assess a coursebook in terms of interculturality.

H5: The Spanish and the English coursebooks that are used in the first year of teaching these two languages in Slovene secondary schools develop attitudes as one of the three main resources of IC on a superficial level.

For the purposes of the confirmation of this last hypothesis, we acquired data related to the level of depth of the attitudes by means of two strategies. The first equation concerns the ratio between the number of all possible descriptors for attitudes in one coursebook (which is different in each of the four coursebooks, despite the fact that the number of possible descriptors is always the same, because each coursebook contains a different quantity of tasks) and the number of the descriptors that are actually present in a given coursebook.

The second method of obtaining results was a bit more complex, as we distributed the predicates into two categories, based on the FREPA’s (2012) descriptions of each predicate category: “less involved” that indicate almost no commitment towards diversity and “more involved” that mark the will to decentre. The first group, thus, comprises predicates A1, A2, A3, A7, A9, A10, A11, A12, A13, A14, A17 and A18, while the “more involved” predicates are A4, A5, A6, A8, A12, A14, A15, A16, A18 and A19. We can observe that there is some overlapping between a small number of predicates (A12, A14, A18)—that is due to these predicates being somewhere in between both categories and, thus, having the qualities of both “less involved” and “more involved” classification. The frequencies that are presented in Table 2, thus, portray the occurrence of the “more involved” descriptors of attitudes or those that develop attitudes on a deep level. The mentioned frequencies for “less involved”

descriptors were acquired by adding together both “less involved” and “more involved”

predicators and then dividing them by the number of “less involved” predicators.

The data acquired via the first strategy and displayed in Table 2 shows that the frequency of the attitudes predicates in all four coursebooks fluctuates between 28% and 34%, which

51 indicates a relatively low level of the depth of attitudes. The results acquired by means of the second method reveal a similar score, as the frequency of “more involved” predicates oscillates between 33% and 38%. Given the relatively low percentages of general attitudes descriptors and those attitudes descriptors that are “more involved”, visible in Table 2, we can, therefore, confirm our hypothesis stating that the EFL and SFL coursebooks develop attitudes on a superficial level.

To provide practical examples taken from one of each sets of coursebooks, we can, first, mention, an activity taken from the English coursebook Way Up Intermediate (Collie 2010:

44). In activity 1A we ticked four “less involved” descriptors, among which we can find the descriptors that focus on (1) “attention to foreign languages or cultures”, as the task demands attention given to language and people in general (the questions in the exercise refer to personal health habits and those of other people belonging to the same age group), (2)

“sensitivity to the existence of other languages or cultures or persons or to the existence of linguistic or cultural or human diversity”, as the task encourages “sensitivity towards one’s own language or culture and other languages or cultures” (the answers to the questions inquiring about (un)healthy lifestyles in the exercise may be conditioned by cultural practices), (3) “disposition or motivation with respect to linguistic or cultural diversity or plurality”, as the analysed task promotes “readiness to engage in pluralistic […] communication while following the rituals and conventions appropriate to the context” (the given questions may incentive a debate about various lifestyles and initiate a discussion that should comply with the norms of a respectful exchange of viewpoints). We, as well, ticked one descriptor that has the qualities of both “more involved” and “less involved” descriptors, pointing to the disposition to starting a process of linguistic or cultural decentration or relativisation, as the questions in the task nurture the “disposition to go beyond evidence developed in relation with the mother language or culture in order to comprehend languages or cultures, whichever these may be (better understanding the way they function)”—the questions demand an active use of a foreign language and the given conversation cues might help them to better understand and memorize the differences in certain expressions. All in all, the activity does not really nurture attitudes on a deeper level, as its purpose remains on the safe ground of attention, sensitivity and disposition to understand, primarily, linguistic (but potentially also cultural) differences

52 and does not enter into the sphere of a linguistic or cultural decentration, that is, being prepared to distance oneself from one’s own linguistic or cultural perspective.

The second example is taken from the Spanish coursebook Diverso 1 (Encina et al. 2015: 69).

We marked off six “less involved” descriptors and four “more involved” descriptors in activity 2. The task, first and foremost, requires attention and sensitivity to, curiosity about, disposition with respect to and an attitude of critical questioning towards languages and cultures in general and the disposition to start a process of linguistic or cultural decentration.

The question about the influence that other cultures exert on the cuisine of the learner’s country imposes on a learner to become attentive to the similarities and differences (in social practices, such as eating habits) between the source and target culture, to be intrigued by the

The question about the influence that other cultures exert on the cuisine of the learner’s country imposes on a learner to become attentive to the similarities and differences (in social practices, such as eating habits) between the source and target culture, to be intrigued by the