The Impact of Textbook Input on EFL Iranian Learners' Pragmatic Awareness

Abstract

The study was carried out within an area of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) that centered on the learners' degree ofawareness concerning speech acts, conversational implicatures, speakers' attitude (or register) and communicationkey. Targeting a gap in ILP, the researcher aimed to compare the performance of three groups of EFL Iranian studentsof different conversation textbook backgrounds (i.e. New Interchange, Headway, Iran Language Institute Textbook)and of different genders on a multiple-choice discourse completion task (MDCT) to see whether the type of input,represented by the textbook and instruction, affects their performance. The elicitation task, validated by theresearcher, required the subjects to read a written description of a situation (including such factors as setting,participant roles, and degree of imposition) and asks them to select what would be the best to say in that situation.This required recognizing pragmatically correct utterances which differs from recognizing linguistically correctsentences because appropriate language requires an L2 learner to understand not only linguistic information, such asvocabulary and syntax, but also contextual information such as the role and status of the interlocutor. To this end, 121male and female students from three language institutes with different textbooks on their curriculum were selectedand assigned to the groups. The descriptive statistics revealed a below-aveage performance (i.e. below one third ofthe total score) for all three groups and the results of two-way ANOVA showed no significant differences amonggroups in terms of pragmatic awareness. The findings imply that FL Learners' pragmatic information should beraised explicitly by language teachers and textbook developers.