This content analysis explored children's fictional storybooks and informational science books to determine their differences in high-quality text features that support oral language (OL) development. We also explored the opportunities for OL development in curricular books compared to trade books. Using systematic coding procedures, we evaluated…

Reading comprehension is an important skill throughout all stages of education. However, Portuguese pupils still demonstrate difficulties in understanding what they read. In addition to cognitive and psychological factors, it is important to understand how this skill is addressed in textbooks. Here, we examined how reading comprehension is…

Listening materials are commonly developed so students show their understanding of a specific oral discourse. Oral interactions provided in textbooks are resources in which different interactional practices are involved, repair practices being one of these. This article seeks to explore, first, the types of repair practices found in Spanish as a…

The issue of whether, when, and how to respond to learners' oral errors is something every teacher has to consider. Early studies of teachers' feedback practices consisted of observations of how they managed this complex process (e.g., Lyster & Ranta, 1997). Beginning with these descriptions, a large body of research on types of oral…

Vocational education (VE) has been a priority for employability globally. There is, however, limited research on what employers want from secondary school VE graduates regarding their communication skills. This study examined business English needs in Greek businesses and the English language skills taught in Greek vocational secondary schools. We…

Needs analysis is regarded as an essential step for developing a curriculum for English for specific purpose courses. Assessing learners' present and real-life language needs can contribute to learners' active participation in learning processes. This study aimed to assess English geared law learners' needs and to analyze the pedagogical tasks in…

Research has shown that teaching second language (L2) learning strategies explicitly promotes an increase in strategy use and in oral proficiency. Consequently, a checklist based on the six types of strategies from Oxford's taxonomy (1990) was created to analyze strategic instruction in the most common textbooks used in the last year of Higher…

This article presents the results of a content analysis of 10 current public-speaking textbooks to determine the nature and extent to which they teach listening in an integrated approach with public speaking as an oral activity. Lewis and Nichols (1965) predicted that listening would increasingly be taught especially in an integrated approach with…

Saudi Arabian Ministry of Education is seeking for the best English language textbook to be taught in schools in order to develop the Saudi education in the future. To choose the most beneficial one, frameworks or tools were designed to analyze and to evaluate a unit of a textbook in Saudi Arabia based on standard criteria. These standard criteria…

Many attempts are currently being made to develop Aural-Oral Communicative skills in English at school level, but it remains a difficult task for the teachers of English. There are a lot of readymade cassettes available in the market but they have hardly served the purpose. Admittedly, cassettes help and yield better results for learners, subject…

Reveals that in the average number of words per T-unit, the complexity of basal reader passages generally exceeds that of children's oral language, and that none of the basal series studied exhibited a graduated increase in average number of words per T-unit among passages in the same reader. (FL)

A study examined composition textbooks to determine any trends in composition instruction from 1900 to 1959. The study period was divided into three periods--1900 to 1917, 1918 to 1935, and 1936 to to 1959--and three textbooks from each period were content analyzed. A categorical framework was formulated, permitting allocation of tasks found…