چكيده
This study investigates 19 dialogues of two English textbooks of the Iranian junior high school to see whether they meet criteria of natural language. After a thorough review of related literature, a model of naturalness was adopted on the basis of the features of spoken language. There are six main features of spoken language in the model: contextualizability, communicativeness, appropriateness, unfolding, text potential, and features of authentic speech. To analyze the data, a qualitative method was used. The dialogues were analyzed against the items of the model through discussing and explaining the points in which features of naturalness had been neglected. The results revealed that the dialogues of the textbooks were removed from naturalness in language, seriously failed to express their contextualizability, lacked communicativeness and appropriateness, and presented relatively few features of natural unfolding, text potential and features of authentic speech. The pedagogical disadvantage is that the dialogues of the textbooks seem unlikely to occur in real life, present rather stilted, dry, contrived language patterns to learners; so, learners may not have a chance to know what natural foreign language is like. Finally, this study highlights the importance of including natural language in the dialogues of the Iranian junior high school English textbooks and makes some pedagogical suggestions about how this can be done.
