The Concept of the Textbooks for Learning the Latin Alphabet Prescribed in the Curriculum

Abstract

According to the new Curriculum for the second grade of elementary education (2018), the Latin alphabet is taught, in schools where Serbian is the mother tongue, as the second alphabet, after the acquisition of the Cyrillic alphabet. The new textbooks which follow the new Curriculum (2018) were written and published by numerous authors and publishing houses in 2019. Consequently, 12 textbooks in the Catalogue of textbooks for the second and sixth grades of elementary education are listed as approved textbooks for learning the Latin alphabet. Furthermore, two publishing houses have listed two textbooks for the same subject respectively, only written by different authors, and one publishing house offers a digital edition as well. These textbooks have different titles, concepts, and volume. The goal of this paper is to analyze the content for the Latin alphabet learning in the current Curriculum and in the accredited textbooks. In the paper, we analyze first the Curriculum (2018), i.e., the outcomes, content, and instructions for learning the Latin alphabet, and secondly, the methodological concept of the textbooks for learning the second writing system according to the Curriculum. The methodological analysis is focused on the framework of the curriculum, the concepts, and functionality of textbooks for learning the Latin alphabet. After an in-depth analysis, it was concluded that the current Curriculum (2018) does not contain detailed instructions for learning the Latin alphabet, therefore, the concepts of various textbooks for learning this alphabet differ significantly.

Keywords

• the latin alphabet
• textbooks for learning the latin alphabet
• curriculum
• outcomes of learning the latin alphabet
• learning of reading and writing.