چكيده
The textbook is the heart of the curriculum and syllabus in many classrooms. On the other hand, there are plenty of ELT textbooks in the market that seem to be convenient on the surface and the selection of the most suitable textbook is difficult for an inexperienced teacher. However, based on the previous studies, these textbooks seldom provide students with adequate information to successfully acquire pragmatic competence. It is out of these considerations that this study investigates the types and percentages of language functions within the conversational components of eight English textbooks taught in the Iranian English language institutions, namely the Elementary and Pre-Intermediate Touchstone and Iran Language Institute (ILI) series. To this end, the whole language functions in the dialogue and conversation section of the selected textbooks were explored on the basis of Halliday’s (1978) language function model to see whether these books provide the learners with adequate pragmatic information. The reliability of results was checked by two independent inter-raters. In addition, Chi-Square test was conducted to delineate the level of distribution for the specified pragmatic variables in the conversations. ILI and Touchstone series were compared in the two levels of Elementary and Pre-Intermediate. The results revealed that the conversational components in these textbooks were not efficient enough on account of both the lack and low frequency of some language functions as well as the unequal distribution of these pragmatic variables which means that the pragmatic information in these books was not adequate to develop learners’ pragmatic competence. Finally, some implications for teachers and textbook designers were proposed.
Keywords: Textbook evaluation, Language Functions, Pragmatic Competence
