Abstract:

The textbook serves as the most frequently used medium of instruction in the pedagogical practice of primary education. The language of instructional tasks both shapes the student's thinking and serves as a relatively effective means of developing their cognitive abilities. Instructional tasks are thus understood as distinct epistemic constructs, characterized by their unique linguistic features. The aim of this study is to analyze the language of tasks in textbooks used in the undergraduate training of future primary education teachers. Our research focused on identifying the lexical, morphological, and syntactic specifics of task language and determining whether these characteristics vary across different textbooks or remain consistent. The analysis involved separating the task texts from other discourse and identifying their structural components. Tasks from two textbooks of Science for the second and for the third year of primary education published by the same publisher were analyzed. A total of 144 tasks out of 704 (20% of the total tasks) were examined. The results revealed that students require a vocabulary of approximately 400 words to comprehend the task instructions. The necessary vocabulary is higher in the second grade than in the third grade. Morphologically, the analysis showed that the second-grade textbook contains pronouns in nearly every other task instruction, which increases the complexity of text comprehension. In the third-grade textbook, the number of pronouns is significantly lower. Syntactically, it was found that instructions in second-grade textbooks are longer (an average of 1,73 sentences) compared to third-grade textbooks (1,33 sentences). The number of words per sentence is almost identical in both textbooks. These linguistic specifics significantly impact the functionality of textbook texts and their usability in teaching. The authors believe that the published research findings are not only foundations for improving the quality of the analyzed textbooks in the future. They also serve as stimuli that teach students to comprehensively understand the problem of creating instructional tasks and to grasp more deeply the relationship between the language of task instructions and the student's learning performance.

Acknowledgement:
The published research is financially supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the contract No. APVV-22-0450.

Keywords:

Language of tasks, textbooks in primary education, content analysis.