An Analysis of Conversations in Curriculum-based EFL Textbooks for Senior High School in Indonesia and the Comparison with Corpus-based English Textbooks

Abstract

To achieve the purpose of successful language teaching, the materials should represent the actual use of English to equip learners with communicative skills. In fact, some research has shown that there are mismatches between conversations in textbooks and authentic conversations. Regarding the foreign status of English in Indonesia, it is compelling to further study the conversations in the textbooks enabling for the improvement of the materials. This study examines the characteristics and features of conversations in curriculum-based EFL textbooks for senior high school in Indonesia, namely Bahasa Inggris X, Bahasa Inggris XI, and Bahasa Inggris XII. To profoundly elaborate on this topic, this study identifies conversation features in the textbooks and compares them with characteristics of conversations in three corpus-based English textbooks, Touchstone 1, Touchstone 2, and Touchstone 3. The results show that there are some discrepancies between textbooks in Indonesia with the conversational features and with conversations in corpus-based textbooks. Indonesian EFL textbooks predominantly lack hesitation devices and the use of discourse markers is less varied. In terms of topics, Indonesian EFL textbooks are alike corpus-based textbooks; both focus on everyday topics. The other topics, however, remain problematic since Indonesian EFL textbooks insignificantly talk about school life and mostly talk about social topics and self-topics. Corpus-based textbooks, on the contrary, avoid social topics. These mismatches are inevitably questionable, as conversations in textbooks should exemplify the real conversational features. Pedagogically speaking, textbook writers should consider the naturalness of the conversations to support the EFL teaching practice in Indonesia.

Collocates of 'great' and 'good' in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and Indonesian EFL textbooks

“…Before these studies, Cheng and Warren (2007) have identified the differences between the mutual understanding expressions in spoken English and those in textbooks. Having identical results, Oktavianti et al (2020) claim that conversational features in textbooks do not correspond to those in natural conversations such as the use of discourse markers, response forms, hesitation devices, and interjections. Those features are monotonous in textbooks and some of them did not match the natural use.…”

“…This study, however, delimits to spoken English since it is believed that spoken and written language has slightly different characteristics due to different mediums that lead to various linguistic features as well as lexical choices (Biber & Quirk, 2012). Textbook conversations seem to have some discrepancies with authentic conversations (Oktavianti et al, 2020;Setiaji, 2016;Siegel, 2014). Since adjectives are lexical categories and have a huge number of members, this study limited the analysis to 'great' and 'good' since they are frequent adjectives in the Corpus of I. N. Oktavianti & J. Sarage,Collocates of 'great' and 'good' in corpus of contemporary American English and Indonesian EFL textbooks | 460 Contemporary American English (COCA) (in the 4 th and the 1 st rank), and they belong to the same type of adjective, 'value' adjective (Dixon, 2005).…”

A Corpus-Based Analysis of Lexical Collocation in Conversation Texts of English Textbooks

“…Being described as arbitrary collocation combinations often created from the informal situation such as conversation. In "Bahasa Inggris" textbook, the conversation texts are mostly focus on informal everyday topics such as school life, social, and self (Oktavianti et al, 2020). From the informal situations of the conversations there are possibilities of collocation combination to be used.…”

Google Books Corpus and designing English for specific purposes materials

“…Corpus linguistics helps us to understand how the use of names is shaped by the lexical, grammatical, and extralinguistic context. Oktavianti and Fajria (2021) compared the modal verbs in conversation sections in Indonesian EFL textbooks with COCA. They found that there are some mismatches of modal verb usage in the textbook and COCA.…”