Communicative Activities in Saudi EFL Textbooks: A Corpus-driven Analysis

Abstract

This paper investigates the speaking and communication tasks in EFL textbooks in Saudi Arabia by means of corpus analysis. This analysis explores the extent to which the speaking tasks provided in Saudi EFL textbooks are communicatively incompetent, and is important due to the unsatisfactory, limited levels achieved by many learners of English at most educational stages, specifically primary, intermediate, and secondary. The reason for the poor oral skills among many EFL learners is due to the absence of authentic language learning tasks in a wide range of situations. The techniques used to detect the range of communicative tasks are based on sketching and retrieving the n-grams of in pairs and the verbal collocates say, talk, tell, ask, and discuss in a span of n = 2 ≤ ≥ 2. The experimental analysis driven from the intended textbooks shows that speaking tasks lack reasonable distributions of everyday communication examples and speaking/communicative situations.