1 Introduction
This page contains Chapter 1 from the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAA) version of the book: https://osf.io/jpxae/. Please cite the Version of Record: https://benjamins.com/catalog/scl.116.
Asked “Where is Brian?”, French nationals of a certain generation will immediately reply: “Brian is in the kitchen”. Those with a particularly good memory may follow up with: “Where is Jenny, the sister of Brian?” – and, to those in the know, the correct answer is: “Jenny is in the bathroom”.1 There is hardly any need for an in-depth linguistic analysis to conclude that this interaction is highly unlikely to have ever taken place in a real English-speaking family home. To most teachers and learners, it will be evident that it is the result of a none too inspired attempt to model WH-question forms in a textbook dialogue aimed at beginner learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Together with dull gap-fill exercises and photos of out-of-date technology, for many adults, the very mention of the word textbook evokes vivid memories of such artificially sounding, contrived and sometimes even nonsensical dialogues.
This raises the question of the status and nature of textbook language as a specific ‘variety’ of language, which is at the heart of the present study. It focuses on contemporary EFL textbooks in use in European secondary schools. Situated at the interface between linguistics and foreign language teaching, this study examines the linguistic content of these textbooks and seeks empirical answers to the questions: What kind of English do school EFL textbooks portray? And how far removed is this variety of English from the kind of English that learners can be expected to encounter outside the EFL classroom?
1.1 Research objectives and methodological approach
The above questions are critical because, as many adults’ lingering memories of school foreign language lessons testify (see also, e.g., Freudenstein 2002: 55), textbooks play an absolutely central role in classroom-based foreign language learning. In the following, we will see that the dominance of textbooks in EFL school contexts persists to this day. According to Thornbury (in a response to Chong 2012: n.p.), they “(more often [than] not) instantiate the curriculum, provide the texts, and - to a large extent - guide the methodology”. In lower secondary EFL instructional contexts, in particular, textbooks constitute a major vector of foreign language input. Yet, numerous studies have shown that “considerable mismatches between naturally occurring English and the English that is put forward as a model in pedagogical descriptions” (Römer 2006: 125–126) exist. These mismatches have been observed and sometimes extensively described in textbooks’ representations of numerous language features ranging from the use of individual words and phraseological patterns (e.g., Conrad 2004 on the preposition though; Gouverneur 2008 on the high-frequency verbs make and take), to tenses and aspects (Barbieri & Eckhardt 2007 on reported speech; Römer 2005 on the progressive). More rarely, textbook language studies have also ventured into the study of spoken grammar (e.g., Gilmore 2004) and pragmatics (e.g., Hyland 1994 on hedging in ESP/EAP textbooks).
However, as we will see in Chapter 2, previous EFL textbook studies have tended to focus on one or at most a handful of individual linguistic features. Taken together, they provide valuable insights into “the kind of synthetic English” (Römer 2004: 185) that pupils are exposed to via their textbooks; yet, what is missing is a more comprehensive, broader understanding of what constitutes ‘Textbook English’ from a linguistic point of view. Although corpus-based2 textbook analysis can be traced back to the pioneering work of Dieter Mindt in the 1980s, the language of secondary school EFL textbooks (as opposed to that of general adult EFL or English for Specific Purposes [ESP] coursebooks) remains an understudied area.
The present study therefore sets out to describe the linguistic content of secondary school EFL textbooks and to survey the similarities and most striking differences between ‘Textbook English’ and ‘naturally occurring English’ as used outside the EFL classroom, with respect to a wide range of lexico-grammatical features.
To this end, a corpus of nine series of secondary school EFL textbooks (43 textbook volumes) used at lower secondary level in France, Germany, and Spain was compiled (see 4.3.1). In addition, three reference corpora are used as baselines for comparisons between the language input EFL learners are confronted with via their school textbooks and the kind of naturally occurring English that they can be expected to encounter, engage with, and produce themselves on leaving school. Two of these have been built specifically for this project with the aim of representing comparable ‘authentic’ (for a discussion of this controversial term in ELT, see 2.2) and age-appropriate learner target language.
A bottom-up, corpus-based approach is adopted (e.g., Biber & Quirk 2012; Biber & Gray 2015; Mindt 1992; 1995; Carter & McCarthy 2006). A broad range of linguistic features are considered: ranging from tenses and aspects to negation and discourse markers. We will pay particular attention to the lexico-grammatical aspects of Textbook English that substantially diverge from the target learner language reference corpora and examine these with direct comparisons of textbook excerpts with comparable texts from the reference data.
1.2 Outline of the book
The following chapter outlines the background to and motivation behind the present study. Chapter 3 then provides a literature review of state-of-the-art research on the language of school EFL textbooks. It is divided in two parts. Part 1 is a methodological review in which the various methods employed so far to analyse, describe, and evaluate Textbook English are explained and illustrated with selected studies. Part 2 summarises the results of existing studies on various aspects of Textbook English, including lexical, grammatical and pragmatic aspects. Based on the methodological limitations and the gaps identified in the existing literature, Chapter 4 elaborates the specific research questions addressed in the present study. These research questions informed the decision-making processes involved in the compilation of the Textbook English Corpus (TEC) and the selection/compilation of three reference corpora designed to represent learners’ target language. These processes and their motivations are explained in the remaining sections of Chapter 4.
Chapter 5 describes the multivariable statistical methods applied to describe the linguistic nature of Textbook English on multiple dimensions of linguistic variation. It begins by explaining the well-established multi-feature/dimensional analysis (MDA) method pioneered by Biber (1988; 1995; see also Berber Sardinha & Veirano Pinto 2014; 2019), before outlining the reasoning for the modified MDA framework applied in the present study. Chapter 6 presents the results of an MDA model of Textbook English which highlights the sources of linguistic variation within EFL textbooks across several dimensions of intra-textbook linguistic variation. Chapter 7 presents the results of a second MDA model that shows how Textbook English is both, in some respects, similar to and, in others, different from the kind of English that EFL learners are likely to encounter outside the classroom.
Chapter 8 explains how the two models contribute to a new understanding of the linguistic characteristics of Textbook English. This, in turn, has implications for teachers, textbook authors, editors, publishers, and policy-makers. These implications are discussed in Chapter 9. It first considers the potential impact of the substantial gaps between Textbook English and the target reference corpora before making suggestions as to how teachers, textbook authors, and editors may want to improve or supplement unnatural‑sounding pedagogical texts using corpora and corpus tools. Chapter 10 focuses on the study’s methodological strengths and limitations. It explains how the modified MDA framework presented and applied in this study may be of interest to corpus linguists working on a broad range of research questions. Chapter 11 concludes with a synthesis of the most important take-aways from the study. It also points to promising future research avenues.
Dialogue from Speak English 6e série verte (Benhamou & Dominique 1977: 167). It was made popular by stand-up comedian Gad Elmaleh. More information on the context of this textbook dialogue can be found here. An extract of the comedy sketch by Gad Elmaleh that popularised the dialogue can be viewed here with English subtitles: https://youtu.be/11jG7lkwDwU?t=50.↩︎
Here the adjectives ‘corpus-based’ and ‘corpus-driven’ are used synonymously (see, e.g., Meunier & Reppen 2015: 499 for further information as to how these terms are sometimes distinguished).↩︎