The Functions of Textbooks : A Textbook Analysis of Text Genres and their Representation

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study is to investigate which text genres are included in three textbooks intended for the course English 5, and how they are represented. This is done in order to discuss the functions that the textbooks Blueprint A, Solid Gold and Engelska 5 & 6: Outlooks on, can have in the English classroom. The investigation is conducted through a textbook analysis that includes both a quantitative content analysis to create an overview of the text genres, and a close reading text analysis that investigates the representation of the texts with the help of Bloom’s Taxonomy. The investigation finds that all three books contain several different text genres and that they use some of the text genres more frequently than the other books do. This means that the three books have different texts in focus. Since the study also shows that the texts are represented in many different ways, the study concludes that the books can have many different functions, specific for each book and therefore it can be important to evaluate textbooks before using them and to use more than one. However, one major factor that all these three books can help teachers with is to introduce pupils to many different text genres and improve learning by including most of the perspectives introduced by Bloom as important levels of learning.