Abstract
For children with a different mother tongue (OMJ), the path to a successful career starts long before they even think about it. Successful participation in the education system requires language proficiency both in terms of communicative competence (Van Ek,1993) and in terms of the necessary mastery of curriculum content in line with the required outcomes of the Framework Education Programmes.
Teachers and learners then face the dual challenge of communicating in the classroom and mastering the subject content. The paper focuses on the teaching of Czech as a mother tongue and foreign/second language and their interconnection.
In the first part, the authors introduce the new textbook Czech as a second language for 2nd grade pupils of primary school Paráda! Učíme se česky (Převrátilová et al., 2022), innovative didactic methods used in the textbook: in particular, the CLIL (Content Language Integrated Learning) elements, the use of which positively influences, among other things, the motivation to learn the target language (Buckingham et al., 2022), and the presentation of the grammatical curriculum of the subject Czech language, which raises many questions when teaching Czech as a second language. In the second part of the paper, the authors will focus on general issues of mother tongue and second language didactics in today's world, issues of curriculum materials, textbooks and other didactic tools, issues of curriculum reduction, and the goals of teaching Czech in both the mother tongue and second language domains.
They find the starting points for their thinking in foreign language didactics and in the cognitive-communicative principle of mother tongue teaching (Štěpáník, 2018, Wodak, 2012). Reflecting on the points of contact between Czech as a mother tongue and a second language can become a source of inspiration for both teachers and authors of textbooks or curricula.