Is There Room for Pragmatic Knowledge in English Books in Iranian High Schools?

Javad Gholami

English Language Teaching, 2015, vol. 8, issue 4, 39

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.

Date: 2015
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