Norms and Standards in Foreign Language Textbooks

Given that everyday language changes at a very rapid pace, foreign language textbooks quite expectedly cannot follow all the recent trends. The rapid pace of change also exacerbates the assessment of each particular innovation, making it difficult to choose which ones should be included in a textbook and which should be left out. Moreover, should we agree with the trend of using recent newspaper and other media texts in university textbooks? We keep criticizing the language of the media as unreliable and incorrect - is it not hypocritical to use it in textbooks for language learning purposes? This paper is an attempt to answer these and similar questions, basing our conclusions on the example of the most recent Polish and Croatian language textbooks.