| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立屏東教育大學 === 英語學系 === 99 === The purpose of this study is to explore the designs of speaking activities used in Taiwanese and Chinese junior-high-school English textbooks. The present study was carried out using content analysis. Three raters participated in this study and two textbooks series were selected to analyze. The results are as follows: (1) the speaking activities in these two junior high-school English textbooks lack an adequate level of opportunity for authentic communication; (2) a predominance of information-gap activities is found in Textbooks C, and almost three-fourths of the speaking activities of Textbooks T are drills; (3) the overall communicative degree of Textbooks C is higher than that of Textbooks T, and the degrees of communicativeness of the two textbook sets basically conform to the common progression; that is, form-focused activities are gradually de-emphasized, and meaning-focused activities are given more emphasis with the growth of learners’ proficiency; (4) Textbooks T series covers pronunciation teaching including a look at segmental and suprasegmental components; however, in Textbooks C, no suprasegmental features are introduced, and only Book 1 presents pronunciation teaching. The results reveal one reminder for learners, one for teachers and one for publishers respectively: (1) it is feasible for students to speak English in a more meaningful context, even though they are still beginners; (2) the teacher can take advantage of his or her position to do something that textbooks cannot. With the teacher’s work and encouragement, many speaking activities could become more communicative; (3) the textbooks publishers should create more communicative communication activities to support their communicative-oriented claims.
|
|---|
