TEXTBOOK EVALUATION
Textbooks are among the most important components of any educational system.In
English language teaching and learning, particularly in the English as a EFL classroom,
textbooks play an integral part. However, that whether they really provide adequate
pragmatic information for students to successfully develop their pragmatic competence or
not is the problem language teachers should consider when they use them as a means to
help students learn the target language effectively.Pragmaticsis "the study of linguistic
acts and the contexts in which they are performed" (Stalnaker, 1972). The teaching of
pragmatics aims to facilitate the learners' sense of being able to find socially appropriate
language for the situations that they encounter.In this paper, I would like to examine the
pragmatics, as one important aspect of language teaching and learning, concerned with
speech acts and metapragmaticinformation, authenticity, interlanguage competence in the
textbooks, how they are linguistically presented, and effect of pragmatic input on learner
development of pragmatic competence.
First of all, one important aspect of pragmatics is speech acts, which are
communicative ones that convey an intended language function. Speech acts include
functions such as requests, apologies, suggestions, commands, offers, invitations, and
appropriate responses to these acts. In the textbooks, the most frequently appearing
speech acts are making of suggestions, giving advice, complaints, offers, invitations,
accepting and refusing invitation, giving instruction, opening and closing a conversation.
Although the textbook provides most of the common speech acts which are relevant to
students' level in upper-secondary schools, other speech acts, such as making apologies
which quite frequently realized in naturally occurring language and performed in the
fields of interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics are not mentioned in the textbook.
Moreover, the metapragmatic information which include the general explanation
for the functions of speech acts, discussion of politeness (e.g., illocutionary force),
conversation norms, and contexts are not to be provided adequately. Students are only
occasionally provided with a set of relevant expressions about speech acts and some
printed dialogues or examples with very little commentary on usage, contextual
information or explicit metapragmatic discussion. For example, samples of language for
expressing invitations are given without any mention to the significant differences in
utterances in terms of politeness and illocutionary force. It is really necessary to provide
students with multiple form of expressions of making invitations. However, that is not
enough for students to develop their pragmatic competence. Although all these utterances
indicate invitations, they convey some differences in terms of formality and illocutionary
force. The expression "Can you join us in this trip?" is a question, but its illocutionary
force is an invitation. However, the expression like this is informal, and it would be
appropriate if students use it to make an invitation with their intimate friends. When
communicating with a person in the formal contexts, students should use the expressions
like: "Would you like...?". Thus, when teaching students the way to make invitations,
teachers should explain more about the different ways to make invitations in different
contexts. Moreover, teachers should help students distinguish the difference of making
invitations between Vietnamese and English native speakers. For example, Vietnamese
tend to use "invite" as a performance verb in making invitations when they want to invite
someone in a higher position to do something or show their respect, whereas English
native speakers tend to make their invitations using yes or no questions (Would you
like...?). Such information about politeness should be provided to students so that they
can communicate with others successfully.
Finally, regarding authenticity, most of the printed dialogues in the textbook, as
samples for students to imitate, appear not to be very authentic.They seem to aim at
introducing a new grammatical structure rather than providing a source for realistic,
natural or even pragmatically appropriate conversational input to students. Although they
are appropriate for some students at certain stages of language learning, they should be
accurate reflection of native speaker dialogues (Scotton& Bernstein 1988). Let's consider
the following conversation in Task 2 (Unit 2, p.25- TiengAnh 10)(See Appendix).
Although the conversationmentioned above has some features of conversation such as
adjacency pairs, turn-taking, discourse markers, it seems not to be an authentic
conversation. Thus, in order to teach students to manage conversations, keep a
conversation going and help them practice their language speaking skills more naturally
and effectively, the conversation mentioned above should be designed by adding overlap,
filled pauses, back-channels. In addition, opening and closing of conversations are usually
not contained in most of the conversations in the textbook. In the real contexts, it is
obvious that these conversations do not often occur. Therefore, they are not pragmatically
appropriate samples for students to learn. Especially, these conversations lack the
situation of closing conversation with three components "pre-closing", "terminal
exchange" and shutting down of the topic to help students end the conversation naturally.
If textbook writers provide students with good examples of appropriate pragmatic ways to
end conversations, students not only can choose appropriate ways depending on different
contexts but also develop their pragmatic competence.
In conclusion, there is no doubt that the textbook is considered as one of the most
important tool used in raising students’ pragmatic awareness. Although the current
textbooks are designed on CLT, it also has some shortcomings, especially it cannot be
counted on as a reliable source of pragmatic input for students. Most of speech acts are
presented in the textbook, however, the related metapragmatic information is not
sufficient. Besides, most of the conversational samples used in the textbook are not really
authentic. This is because instead of making use of language samples that native speakers
actually produce, many textbooks have drawn on native speakers’ intuition about
language use, which might not always be reliable (Wolfson, 1989a).Therefore, in order to
teach and learn language successfully, it is necessary for textbook writers to write friendly
textbooks in terms of providing pragmatic information to teachers and students. They
should also take into consideration procedures of teaching, selection of authentic
materials and designing of tasks related to speech acts, metapragmatic information and
interlanguage pragmatics to help students practice and develop their pragmatic
competence.
REFRENCES
1. Ministry of Training and Education (2006). TiếngAnh 10, Education Public House.
2. Scotton, C. & J. Bernsten. (1988). Natural conversations as a model for textbook
dialogue. Applied Linguistics 9: 372-384
3. Stalnaker, R. C. (1972). Pragmatics. In D. Davidson & G. Harman (Eds.), Semantics of
Natural Language (pp. 380-397). Dordrecht: Reidel.
4. Virginia LoCastro. (2003). An Introduction to Pragmatics. Social Action for language
Teachers. The University of Michigan Press
5. Vellenga，H．(2004). Learning pragmatics from ESL & EFL textbooks: How likely?
TESL-EJ8/2. Retrieved March 8, 2012 from http://tesl-ej.org/ej30/a3.html
6. Wolfson, N. (1989a). Perspectives: Socialinguistics and TESOL. Newbury House
Publishers
APPENDIX
Task 2: Unit 2, p.25
A:
Hi, Minh. Did you have a nice weekend?
B:
Hello, Quan. Yes, I did. It's great.
A:
What did you do?
B:
I went to Lan's birthday party. The food was good and the people
were interesting. What did you do, Quan?
A:
Oh, I stayed at home and did my homework. Nothing special.
B:
Where are you going now?
A:
I'm going to the library to borrow some books. Sorry, I've got to go.
Talk to you later.
B:
Bye. See you later.