The Representation of Pragmatic Input in English Language Textbooks

Used in Indonesian High Schools

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Ananda Muhammad

Iowa State University

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Abstract

Pragmatic competence has been considered an integral part of communicative language ability (Timpe-Laughlin, Wain, & Schmidgall, 2015). In the Indonesian context where English is taught as a Foreign Language (EFL), communicative competence is an important aspect of the national curriculum for English language teaching. However, pragmatic competence itself is not mentioned explicitly in the curriculum. Nevertheless, the English language curriculum’s basic competencies (a set of competencies that needs to be mastered by learners) mention keywords that are typically considered as indicators of pragmatics, such as politeness, social function, appropriateness, and context. These competencies are also used by textbook publishers to design the materials for their textbooks. Therefore, textbook publishers have a big responsibility to create materials that align with these competencies. With this in mind, this preliminary study seeks to explore the pragmatic information available in English textbooks for Indonesian learners of EFL in the high school level. Specifically, this study aims to answer the following questions: (1) To what extent is pragmatic input included in the Indonesian textbooks for EFL learners? and (2) How is pragmatic input presented in the Indonesian EFL textbooks? A total of 14 EFL textbooks are analyzed in this study. These textbooks were all written by Indonesian writers and published by Indonesian publishers. In addition, 11 of the textbooks are available in large Indonesian bookstores, while the other three textbooks are available online as they were produced by the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia. Hence, it is assumed that these textbooks are representative of the English language textbooks used in Indonesian high school classrooms. The analysis of these textbooks follows Vellenga (2004) and Ren and Han’s (2016) method for analyzing pragmatic information presented in English language textbooks, in which each textbook is analyzed page-by-page and the pragmatic information identified are tallied and coded. The coding includes coding for pragmatic input (i.e., cultural information, metalanguage, and speech act information), as well as how the pragmatic input is presented (e.g., instructions, as part of an activity). Initial findings indicate that there seems to be a limited amount and variety of pragmatic input available in the textbooks analyzed, despite the Indonesian curriculum’s communicative competence approach to English language teaching. Implications for English language teaching in the Indonesian context and future research directions will be discussed.

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Reference

Ren, W., & Han, Z. (2016). The representation of pragmatic knowledge in recent ELT textbooks. ELT Journal, 70(4), 424-434.

Vellenga, H. (2004). Learning pragmatics from ESL and EFL textbooks: How likely? TESL-EJ, 8(2), 1–18.