‘Cultural Activities’ in Foreign Language Teaching: A Multimodal Perspective on Italian Language Textbooks

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the cultural content present in the cultural sections of selected Italian-as-a-foreign-language (FL) textbooks used at the University of Warsaw to teach Italian courses. To explore such content, we apply both a multimodal approach based on visual social semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006) and a framework of cultural paradigms, via the use of which culture is usually introduced in foreign language education. We also conceptualise the notion of cultural activity as a basic research unit with the primary goal of organising a textbook’s cultural content. While exploring the identified cultural activities, we observed that the dominant cultural paradigm is the national one. The explicit focus is put on Italian artistic heritage, geography, and literature, whereas contemporary social problems are less frequently presented, often without references to different points of view. In the discussion, certain pedagogical and content solutions for teaching culture are indicated.