Browsing by Subject "ELT textbooks"

In education, changing the core curriculum usually results in changing textbooks because they should be based on the curriculum at least up to some level. In 2019, the Finnish upper secondary school level National Core Curriculum (NCC) was updated, and it was taken in use in August 2021. Since this NCC change is still recent, the need for researching it is evident. The publisher Otava updated their upper secondary school level English language teaching textbook series Insights to New Insights in response to the NCC change, which created an interest in how the series was modified to fit the change. Therefore, this research is set to show how the English teaching related guidelines in the NCC have changed and how the New Insights series has succeeded in its update with those changes in mind. The main data for the research consisted of the New Insights series’ electronic textbooks, as well as the 2019 NCC for upper secondary school by the Finnish National Board of Education. When the thesis was written, the New Insights series consisted of five books (New Insights 1–2, 3, 4, 5 and 6), and the research focused on all these available books. The Insights series and the prior 2015 NCC were also used for comparison, but the research did not go into detail about these past versions. Qualitative content analysis was used to describe the contents of the 2019 NCC and the textbooks to show how the textbooks have taken into consideration the NCC change and the concepts of the new NCC. In addition to content analysis, task analysis was used to give task-based examples of how certain aspects of these 2019 NCC concepts are visible in the New Insights series. Three major English teaching related NCC changes were identified in the analysis. They were the use of transversal competences as the learning objectives of the subjects, the increased guidance of the student, and the change from “courses” to “modules” in hopes for easy creation of subject-crossing study units. Corresponding to the NCC changes, three aspects of the New Insights series were presented: the visibility of transversal competences, emphasising the language profile and self-assessment, as well as the multidisciplinarity of the DIY tasks in New Insights 5. These findings considered, the research managed to show the relation between the 2019 NCC and New Insights, and it can be concluded that the New Insights series was visibly modified to fit the NCC change.