ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to explain the development of the history of Catalan textbooks for non-Catalan adult speakers and to link this history to broader political and socioeconomic issues. After a presentation of the sociolinguistic situation of Catalan language, the chapter highlights two key moments in the history of Catalan textbooks. The first historical moment is in the 1980s, a time of great transformation in Spain after Franco’s death in 1975 and Spain’s accession to NATO in 1982 and to what was then the European Economic Community in 1986. In this period, Catalan institutions made the first attempts to teach the Catalan language to Spanish speakers living in Catalonia, after four decades in which the institutional and public use of this language was explicitly repressed. The second key moment brings us to the turn of the twenty-first century when Spain experienced rapid economic growth, which led to the arrival of over a million immigrants to Catalonia and a significant rise in students of Catalan as a second language. In this period, there was a proliferation of Catalan language materials addressed mainly to the so-called foreigners living in Catalonia.
