| Summary: | 碩士 === 靜宜大學 === 英國語文學系 === 89 === ABSTRACT
The main purposes of this thesis are to understand the degree of communicativity in the activities and the degree of contextualization of children’s English coursebooks currently used in Taiwan.
Based on Littlewood’s (1989) categories of communicative teaching activities, a model was developed for assessment of communicativity in activities. For classification of contextualization, Waltz’s (1989) two types of exercise were employed. Five sets of children’s English coursebooks currently used in Taiwan are examined. The total number of units and the percentage of different types of activities, texts and contexts included in these coursebooks were calculated and tabulated for analysis and comparison.
The findings show that the children’s English coursebooks currently used in Taiwan have a high percentage of both communicative activities and contextualized texts. In addition, the imported coursebooks show a higher degree of communicativity and contextualization than the local coursebooks. This study also shows that there is no gradual shift of certain activity type among levels for each coursebook set.
Further analyses show that most of the communicative activities the coursebooks adopt are functional communicative activities. The other type of communicative activity, the social interaction activity, did not receive due attention. In addition, although contextualization is commonly found in communicative activities, most of the non-communicative activities are presented in non-ccntextualized texts.
It is therefore suggested that to develop communicative competence, more social interaction activities, such as problem-solving activities, simulations, and improvisions, need to be included in coursebooks. Moreover, it is important that the forms of basic language skills need to be introduced in contextualized texts or in meaningful contexts.
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