English in teacher education: an analysis of English language textbooks

Abstract

The article presents a comparative analysis of English language textbooks intended for students in pedagogical and psychological-pedagogical fields at the levels of secondary vocational and higher education. The relevance of the study is determined by the need to assess the extent to which professional training programs for future teachers are provided with specialized language learning materials. The purpose of the article is to identify the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of textbooks addressed to these categories of learners. The empirical basis of the study includes textbooks published by Russian publishing houses and selected on the basis of bibliographic descriptions and annotations containing a direct indication of pedagogical or psychological-pedagogical orientation. The research employs methods of quantitative counting, comparative analysis, and content-based interpretation. It has been established that the corpus of textbooks for higher education quantitatively exceeds the corpus of editions intended for secondary vocational education. It has also been shown that university-level textbooks are characterized by more precise audience targeting, greater variability of training profiles, and a stronger presence of digital formats. Textbooks for secondary vocational education, by contrast, are marked by a smaller number of titles and a more limited degree of professional specialization. The obtained results indicate an uneven level of instructional support across different levels of pedagogical education. The article concludes that there is a need to expand and update the corpus of English language textbooks for pedagogical colleges with due regard to the objectives of professionally oriented learning. The findings of the study may be used in the development of new educational publications and in improving the course «Foreign Language in Professional Activity».