Elementary German language textbooks today lack diverse representations of gender, social class, race, and ability. This thesis argues that the exclusion of those categories of diversity impedes the objectives of the communicative learning approach for students in first-year German courses. It examines research on diversity in textbooks with a focus on the concept of the “third space”, and shows how these findings apply to German students. An analysis of chapters from three German textbooks published between 2018 and 2020: Netzwerk neu A1, Impuls Deutsch 1, and Grenzenlos Deutsch provides specific examples of how images, texts, dialogs, grammar, and vocabulary exercises could be designed or redesigned to make the German language classroom a space in which all students are able to communicate and express themselves.

No description available.

It is my wish, within the scope of this thesis, to assist teachers at secondary schools who are making a decision about the right choice of books for their stu-dents. It involves an analysis of available German textbooks for beginners, with regards to the choice of topics. In connection with my thesis I also prepared a questionnaire which was distributed among 50 students of secondary schools with the aim to elicit the point of view of the target group. The aim of this thesis is to assess the samples of German textbooks in the Czech market so that they correspond to the criteria of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. For the analysis there has been chosen the sample of textbooks which appear commonly at Czech secondary schools. These include textbooks published by both Czech and German publishing houses, to be specific Německy s úsměvem nově, studio d A1, Sprechen Sie Deutsch? 1. and Themen aktuell 1. Originally I intented to analyse Tangram aktuell 1 instead of Themen aktuell 1 by the the same publisher, but since the first mentioned one is usually used for teaching, I decided for Themen aktuell 1. I have come to the conclusion that it is not possible to create an ideal textbook of either German or any other foreign language, because every student considers a different topic to be important, they have different values and motivation which drives them to learn a foreign language. That is also an implication resulting from the questionnaire in which students evaluated the importance of topics according to their own judgement and preferences.