An Investigation into the Frequency and Types of Pragmatic Features in EFL/ESL Textbooks: The Case of American Headway(2), Interchange (2), and Four Corners (2)

Document Type : Critical Article

Authors

1 Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Golestan University, Gorgan, Iran

2 Department of English Language Teaching, Gorgan Branch, , Islamic Azad University, Gorgan, Iran

Abstract

The textbooks are the center of syllabus and curriculum in classrooms, and they have an important role in English Language Teaching (ELT), but they rarely provide the required materials to acquire pragmatic competence. Findings indicate that teachers' manuals do not contain enough authentic information; thus, they should provide explicit input for language learners to promote their pragmatic information. However, teachers do not tend to use outside materials to teach pragmatics. A kind of pragmatic information which has a vital role in foreign language acquisition is speech act with various kinds in communicative parts of textbooks. Therefore, the present study aimed to analyze three ELT textbooks namely American Headway 2 (Soars & Soars, 1996), Interchange 2 (Hull, Proctor, & Richards, 2013), and Four Corners 2 (Bohlke & Richards, 2012), related to the teaching of functions to find out the frequency and types of speech acts. The present study was a descriptive study based on Vellenga's (2004) framework to illustrate pragmatic information included in ESL and EFL textbooks. It focused on the analysis of metalanguage usage, explicit treatment of speech acts and metapragmatic information. The findings showed that American Headway 2 with 37% included the most pragmatic information, and Interchange 2 with 25% was the poorest among the analyzed textbooks in this study. As a whole, the results revealed that pragmatic input of language learners is not considerable in the textbooks, and textbook metapragmatic plays an important role in speech act realization. Therefore, it seems that one implication of this study is that the EFL/ESL textbooks are poor in metapragmatic information such as speech acts in their communicative parts. Analysis of interactive parts based on cultural and interlanguage pragmatics can help textbook development so that the upcoming textbooks would be designed based on variety of linguistic forms and contextually rich opportunities for students of foreign language.

Keywords

References

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Book Review Journal of Foreign Languages
Volume 1, Issue 2 - Serial Number 2
December 2018
Pages 87-106

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