A Corpus-based Comparative Evaluation of Internationally Published vs. Locally Designed EFL Textbooks Regarding Politeness Strategy Teaching: Interchange vs. Prospect
Due to the important roles of textbooks in language curricula, different experts approached them from different perspectives and devised different procedures for textbook evaluation. The purpose of this study was to investigate politeness strategies included in Iranian high school EFL learners’ textbook: Prospect 3 and in internationally published EFL learners’ textbook: Interchange 2. Moreover, it investigated the difference between these two textbooks in terms of the politeness strategies included and the differences regarding the use of politeness strategies among Prospect 3, Interchange 2, and British National Corpus (BNC). In order to achieve these goals, the researcher analyzed each task in the books in order to know what functions were incorporated and what the frequencies of each function were. Then these frequencies were used to compare the textbooks with one another and with the corpus. The results of the study showed that both textbooks included the strategies heterogeneously among the lessons. Moreover, further investigations showed that the types of strategies used in the lessons were varying greatly in one lesson to another. However, direct politeness strategies were the exceptions since they were present in all lessons. In addition, there was not a significant difference between the two textbooks in terms of the distribution of the types of strategies including direct, positive, negative and indirect politeness strategies. Finally, there was a significant difference between the two textbooks in terms of applying the natural English bundles, collocations, and terms related to politeness in terms of their frequency in authentic English as it was reflected in BNC.
