EFL teachers' views and corpus analysis of English coursebooksused in Turkish state schools in terms of authentic grammaticaland lexical contents with a specific focus to the use of "must"

Abstract

Considering the fact that one of the most significant difficulties experienced in foreign language teaching and learning is the abstractness feature of the language content, it can be assumed that the coursebooks are primary sources in embodying the language taught and providing interaction both inside and outside of the classroom. The contents of the coursebook used extensively as the reference and source materials in our country have great importance in terms of existing language structures specific to the target language, and their competence in using these language structures for more efficient foreign language teaching and learning. In the light of information, in this study, the sufficiency and limitations of foreign language coursebooks used in state schools affiliated to the Ministry of National Education were aimed to be revealed by making corpus-based comparisons with the coursebooks written by native English writers. As a first step of the study, a questionnaire and a semi-structured interview were conducted with English teachers. Then, a native corpus named as REF CC (Reference CourseBook Corpus) was compiled by using the contents of the four coursebooks written by the native English writers as appropriate for the corpus-based studies. The corpus compiled from these reference books has been considered as containing authentic features and compared to the English coursebooks used in state schools in our country by using Sketch Engine, an online corpus query tool. At the end of the study, the contents of the non-native corpus was found to include little similarity to authentic language in terms of certain grammatical items and frequency of their collocations. In this sense, certain points that need to be revised and changed were revealed in detail. Lastly, the study emphasized the role of the corpus approaches to material development and evaluation and also made advisory evaluations for the coursebook writers in the Ministry of National Education.