Teaching language and language expression to students is often demanding and difficult. For this reason, the teacher has the main role in teaching language content. He must choose functional methodological tools for language teaching. An important methodological tool that enables students to acquire the content of language and linguistic expression is the linguo-methodical template. When choosing a linguo-methodical template for language teaching and linguistic expression, certain criteria should be followed. The aim of this paper is to investigate the compliance of linguo-methodical templates presented in current textbooks of the Croatian language for classroom teaching with the principles of functional communication approach. In addition, a comparison was made with the results of a survey conducted in 2019. The analysis concluded that linguo-methodical templates in current textbooks are increasingly in line with the functional communication approach, but that linguo-methodical templates are still not in line with important principles of Croatian language teaching. Also, the aim was to examine what criteria teachers are guided by when choosing linguo-methodical templates. Therefore, a survey questionnaire was conducted for this purpose among primary school teachers. The results of the qualitative analysis of the textbook and the quantitative analysis of the questionnaire are presented in the last two chapters of the paper. Of the four hypotheses formulated, two were rejected, one was accepted, and one of them, according to the results of the questionnaire, could neither be accepted nor rejected.