Abstract
Pragmatic competence and its development has been a pivotal issue in ELT in the last two decades. This paper explored pragmatic knowledge incorporation into Iranian EFL textbooks. Three high school English books named ‘English Book 2, English Book 3 and Learning to Read English for Pre-University Students’ were investigated with regard to their use of pragmatic features of English. These three textbooks were analyzed specifically based on speech acts, four politeness strategies, and lexical and syntactic classification. In addition, tense in temporal deixis, adjacency pairs and hesitation marks were analyzed too. The findings demonstrated that little consideration is given to the incorporation of pragmatic knowledge in developing these materials. This shortcoming may partially account for artificiality of the textbooks. Based on the findings, it is suggested that textbook developers include more pragmatic knowledge into Iranian EFL textbooks to increase on the one hand the authenticity of the textbooks and on the other hand pragmatic knowledge of Iranian EFL students.
Highlights
IntroductionWithout doubt, fundamental in the creation of the global village
Language is, without doubt, fundamental in the creation of the global village
Scanning through the pragmatic books and articles, it can be observed that the major part of the pragmatic scope was allocated to speech acts since they encompass most of the language functions
Summary
Without doubt, fundamental in the creation of the global village. This can be to the extent that its nonexistence makes the globalization shake to the core. Knowledge of languages enables us to perceive new horizons, to think globally, and to increase our understanding of ourselves and of our neighbors. Languages are the lifeline of globalization, and communicating internationally demands languages through which meanings are created and exchanged. Creating and exchanging meanings are not that easy since language is a complex system. It is composed of many different subsystems: phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax, semantics and pragmatics (Freeman, 1997)
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