For the birds: Absence and vision in teaching texts

Abstract

The most successful second language textbook in the history of the discipline, a text used in a wide range of countries for centuries after its publication, was the Orbis Sensualium Pictus (World of Sensory Things in Pictures) by John Amos Comenius (1658). It went through at least 248 distinct editions stretching from the late 17th to the mid-20th century (Pilz, 1967). Though the frequent claim that it was the first illustrated children’s book is false (Good, 1942), it was innovative, influenced later textbook design, and is still studied (Michel, 1992). The text was organized into 150 illustrated chapters, each offering a woodcut image of a scene with numbered items corresponding to words in the bilingual text beneath it. The Orbis Pictus includes no less than six chapters about birds. The first (“Living Creatures: and First, Birds”) begins with the sentence, “Animal vivit, sentit, movet se; nascitur, moritur, nutritur, & crescit; stat aut sedet, aut cubat, aut graditur” (A living creature lives, perceives, moves itself, is born, dies, is nourished, and grows; stands or sits or lies or walks). The living beings exemplified