The role of visual aids for teaching grammar in selected textbooks for German as a foreign language in the Czech Republic

Visual aids fulfil many roles in German textbooks: illustrative, aesthetic, motivational, etc. This article focuses on one of these roles: the function of images and their ability to help mediate grammar. The core focus is visual/grammar metaphors that can be, in an abstract sense, perceived as "images" (cf. a. o. Roche, EL-Bouz & Leuchte 2018). From this point of view, we have analysed the quality of selected textbooks for German as a foreign language available on the Czech market. Using the example of two grammatical phenomena (sentence structure or sentence framework, and modal verbs), we have examined what specific visual aids are used in explanations of the curriculum and in what way they can make it easier or more difficult for students to understand. We have assessed this in terms of the concept of text comprehensibility (cf. primarily with the "Kremser Modell" according to Lutz 2017) and compared the textbooks with each other and discussed their potential optimisation based on these results.