An Analysis of Conversation Structure in Iranian Junior Secondary ELT Textbooks

Textbook is one of the factors affecting students’ learning. No teaching-learning situation is imaginable without textbooks. So, textbook designers try to design and develop teaching material more carefully. This study intends to evaluate the conversation structure of a textbook package titled Prospect that has been used by English teachers at Iranian junior secondary schools since 1392. A number of significant features of conversation needs to be included in materials for teaching conversational skills. In this paper, we tried to evaluate the conversations in the Prospect package in respect of conversation analysis (henceforth CA) research. The structure of the conversations in English textbooks Prospect were compared with that found in conversation analysis (CA) research. The findings showed that some elements of real interactions such as turn- taking, adjacency pairs and some discourse markers were present in the conversations, but elements like hesitations, refusal to requests or interruptions were absent in the dialogues. Since the ‘Prospect’ package has been designed for beginners, it is justifiable not to include all the elements of real interactions. At elementary levels, the students are supposed to learn the basics of the conversation and to experience language use

کلیدواژه ها:

evaluation ، conversation analysis ، textbooks ، Prospect series ، real- life interaction