On Orality Of EFL Coursebook Dialogues

This study makes an investigation into features of orality in dialogues in twoseries of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) coursebooks, so as to reveal how EFLcoursebook dialogues reflect orality of real-life dialogues. The study is based on 32typical oral features collected from Biber (1988) and Biber et al. (1999) which areassociated with six main functional characteristics of conversation proposed by Leech(2000). It is carried out in two dimensions: frequency distribution analysis andfunctional characteristics analysis. The research questions are:1. How are typical oral features distributed in dialogues in two seriesof EFL coursebooks?2. How do distinguishing features reflect functional characteristics ofconversation?First of all, two series of EFL coursebooks are chosen from The Corpora ofEnglish Education in China constructed by South China Normal University. One ofthem refers to a series of Chinese EFL coursebooks, namely, Go For It for juniorEnglish and New Senior English For China for senior English. The other refers to aseries of EFL coursebooks published in Britain, namely, Collins COBUILD EnglishCourse, which is claimed to involve real-life dialogues and thus is used as thereference object of comparison. Dialogues in these two series of EFL coursebooks areextracted to form a mini-corpus of coursebook dialogues (12,8686 words in total).The part-of-speech tagging tools GoTagger (Delphi, 2005) and the lexical analysistools WordSmith (Scott, 1996) are used with manual classification in data coding andprocessing. In addition, the statistical analysis tools SPSS (SPSS Inc, 1989) isemployed for Chi-Square test of significance.For the first research question, a comparison is conducted on frequencydistribution of a group of typical oral features between Chinese EFL coursebook dialogues and the reference coursebook dialogues to find out their shared features anddistinguishing features. For the second research question, a general analysis is carriedout mainly on the basis of frequency distribution of the distinguishing features byassociating them with six main functional characteristics of conversation. In addition,the author probes into the most distinguishing feature in functional terms.The findings of the frequency comparison show that there are moredistinguishing features (77.42%) between two series of EFL coursebooks. Among thedistinguishing features, there are more underused features (62.50%) than overusedfeatures (37.50%) in Chinese EFL coursebook dialogues in contrast with the referencecoursebook dialogues. The findings of general functional analysis manifest thatChinese EFL coursebook dialogues appear less contextualized, less involved, lessinteractive and less constrained by real-time processing, but more explicitly politethan the reference coursebook dialogues. Moreover, they appear relatively moresyntactically elaborated and semantically redundant. The findings of a case study onthe most distinguishing feature Inserts reinforce the findings of the general functionalanalysis and further show that some commonly used inserts as well as some importantfunctions of commonly used inserts are less demonstrated in Chinese EFL coursebookdialogues.The findings suggest that it is meaningful to have an overall view of orality ofEFL coursebook dialogues before an evaluation on their advantages or disadvantages.Seeing that there is a large proportion of distinguishing features in Chinese EFLcoursebook dialogues in contrast with the reference coursebook dialogues, the presentauthor suggests that basic EFL coursebooks which are listening-and-speaking orientedshould provide more exposure to orality of real-life dialogues. EFL coursebookcompilers and teachers are also advised to pay more attention to the associationbetween typical oral features and the main functional characteristics of conversation,so as to make good use of oral materials in current EFL coursebooks and makeimprovements in EFL oral materials compiling and spoken language teaching.