An Evaluation of the Pragmatics in the "Cutting Edge" Intermediate Textbooks

Atieh Farashaiyan,Rahman Shahragard,Kim Hua Tan

doi:10.17576/3l-2018-2404-12

Abstract

Regardless of the prodigious impacts of today’s technologies and the substantial influence of language learning through the mediation of computers the world over, coursebooks undeniably have an important role in ESL settings. Accordingly, regular evaluation of textbooks’ materials is a vital task for experts in the field. The evaluation not only can contribute to the learning and teaching process, it also warrants its suitability for the contextual and individual usage. Evaluation is regarded as an inherent section of the teaching and learning procedures. As such, the current study intends to evaluate the pragmatic content of Cutting-Edge int ermediate text books (Sarah & Peter 2007), which are currently used in most ESL language colleges. Specifically, it analyzes the conversation sections of all Cutting-Edge intermediate books based on the two pragmatic variables: language functions and speech acts. , The study also investigates the provision of sufficient data with regard to context and meta-pragmatics included in these textbooks. The pragmatic taxonomies, Halliday’s (1978) and Searle’s (1976) models were employed in data analysis. The findings illustrated that pragmatic materials were not sufficient to develop learners’ second language pragmatic features. Furthermore, the conversation parts were not efficient and functional from the pragmatic point of view. Keywords: Cutting-Edge intermediate series; Development; ESL textbooks; Evaluation; L2 pragmatic competence

Highlights

The globalization and its succeeding world impacts such as the growing communications among members of different communities with diverse socio-cultural backgrounds has resulted in the need for the development of L2 pragmatic knowledge
The results showed that all three intermediate Cutting-Edge intermediate textbooks are not pragmatically rich and effective in terms of type and frequency of speech acts and language functions
The reason is that since these textbooks have just focused on some speech acts, they learn some of them and become proficient in them while they will not exposed to other ones and as a result, they perform weakly

Summary

Introduction

The globalization and its succeeding world impacts such as the growing communications among members of different communities with diverse socio-cultural backgrounds has resulted in the need for the development of L2 pragmatic knowledge. The pragmatic competence is the most important component of communicative knowledge (Backman & Palmer 2000, Eslami-Rasekh 2005, Farashaiyan et al 2017) Having this knowledge, a speaker can express his/ her intentions and meanings via communicative or speech acts in proper forms in a special social and cultural setting of interaction. A speaker can express his/ her intentions and meanings via communicative or speech acts in proper forms in a special social and cultural setting of interaction To put it in another word, this feature of language proficiency comprises mutually possessing linguistic tools for communicating communicative acts and identifying the social and cultural restraints to use the tools communicatively (Kasper & Rose 2002, Eslami-Rasekh 2005, Tan & Farashaiyan 2016). These materials should present learners with authentic and real examples of speech act strategies or semantic formulas in order to convey their intended

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