A Language-Sensitive Textbook Analysis

Germany has a significant number of people who did not learn German as their first language. For this learning group, German can represent a challenge to achieving a successful vocational education, but even native German speakers can experience language difficulties; one approach to overcoming language barriers is language-sensitive teaching. Textbooks serve as a didactic medium for planning, initiating and supporting school learning processes, and this paper investigates the extent to which textbooks for business education at vocational schools are designed to be language sensitive. An analysis of a textbook from a language-sensitive perspective reveals that the majority of the text and tasks in the textbook have language-sensitive elements but that there remains potential for improvement at the word, sentence, text and visual levels of analysis.