The Communicative Competence Elements in the Foreign Language Textbooks: A Descriptive Case Study on Turkish and English Textbooks


CANER M., Celik A.

IARTEM E-JOURNAL, cilt.12, sa.1, 2020 (ESCI) identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 12 Sayı: 1
  • Basım Tarihi: 2020
  • Doi Numarası: 10.21344/iartem.v12i1.727
  • Dergi Adı: IARTEM E-JOURNAL
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), EBSCO Education Source
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: Textbook evaluation, Communicative competence, Speaking activities in textbooks, INTERCHANGE SERIES
  • Akdeniz Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

The textbooks used in teaching a foreign language are considered as essential tools since the more quality a textbook is, the better learning or teaching occurs. Therefore, the studies conducted on analyzing and evaluating the textbooks have contributed to the field of developing textbooks. Thus, we aim to analyze and compare the use of communicative competence components, namely pragmatic competence, discourse competence and strategic competence in the speaking activities of two textbooks used in teaching English and Turkish as a foreign language. We adopted a descriptive case study design within the qualitative research framework to serve the purpose of the study and analyzed the textbooks through the combination of the impressionistic, checklist, and in-depth-internal evaluation methods. The comparative evaluation of the textbooks revealed that although the pragmatic competence component is covered pleasingly, we found the discourse competence component is covered more effectually in the textbook used in teaching English as a foreign language. Additionally, we found that neither of the books is particularly weak in covering the strategic competence aspects in the speaking activities. Based on our findings, we suggest textbook writers and publishers consider these points to provide learners with more natural language use as well as more communication functions of the target language in designing textbooks for foreign language teaching.