Multilingualism and diversity of languages are important resources of human society. Various diaphasic, diatopic, diastratic and socio-situational variations coexist within a same language. "Linguistic competence" includes the nuance and the use of these variants in different contexts of usage. However, the neutral and text-based onefold "normed" register dominates with absolute priority in the teaching and in the edition of foreign language textbooks in China. This leads to the fact that our learners can only verbalize the standard written language, without being able to vary their language levels according to the different communication contexts (especially in colloquial conversations). The present work aims to study the role of representation of French textbooks at the intersection of linguistic "norm" and "variations". We try to raise the awareness of our learners, through a multimodal introduction from the beginning of learning, to various usages of modern French and to a multiple cultural otherness.