A Comparative Study of Speech-acts in the Textbooks by Native and Non-native Speakers: A Pragmatic Analysis of New Interchange Series vs. Locally-made EFL Textbooks

Abstract

Only through the materials reflecting the language used by native speakers, can language learners become pragmatically competent in a particular language. Traditionally, dialog as a special tool has been used by textbook writers to enhance learners' linguistic and pragmatic competence in EFL teaching situations. However, despite the need for such authentic materials, the content of most dialogs, in the Iranian EFL textbooks developed by the Iranian materials developers, seems to differ from the type of language used by native speakers. Therefore, the present study attempted to investigate the types and the numbers of speech acts included in Right Path to English and the New Interchange series. For this purpose, 225 utterances from each textbook were selected and analyzed based on the Searle's (1979) speech act framework. The reliability of results was checked by two independent inter-raters. To compare the speech acts included in the two textbooks, the Chi-square formula was employed. The results revealed that there is a meaningful difference between the speech acts used in the two textbooks.