The Communicative Competence Elements in the Foreign Language Textbooks

A Descriptive Case Study on Turkish and English Textbooks

Abstract

The textbooks used in teaching foreign language are considered as important tools since the more quality a textbooks 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 our aim is 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 to the purpose of the study, and analyzed the textbooks through the combination of impressionistic, checklist, and in-depth-internal evaluation methods. The comparative analysis 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 are particularly weak in covering the strategic competence aspects in the speaking activities. Based on our findings, we highly suggest to the textbook writers and publishers to pay more attention to such weak points in order to simulate the natural language use and to increase the communication functions of the textbooks used in foreign language teaching.