Evaluating Pragmatic Information In The Algerian Efl Secondary School Textbook At The Crossroads

Résumé: In the Algerian context, the textbook plays a pivotal role in supplying learners with various rules needed for communicating and understanding the target language. To this day, textbooks remain a major source if not the only source of formal language instruction at all levels. That is why, books designers focus on making pragmatic awareness and competence at the heart of the newly introduced manuals. Still, it is unknown if the pragmatic information existing in the textbook is satisfactory or not. Building up on this, the present study aims to investigate the amount of pragmatic information offered by "At the crossroads" secondary education schoolbook. This research uses a page-by-page analysis of the textbook following a quantitative study of the data according to the appearance of speech acts and explicit meta-pragmatic cues. The results indicate that the textbook offers a variety of speech acts and meta-pragmatic information, yet they are decontextualized and offered with little regards to formality, appropriateness and register. Furthermore, meta-pragmatic information is simplified and lacks several elements that should be there to explain speech acts use. Therefore, the textbook's input lacks situational and social appropriateness when it comes to conversation samples which may affect student's pragmatic awareness and communicative competence.

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