Communicative language teaching: Do tasks and activities in school textbooks facilitate learners’ development of communicative competence?

Abstract

This paper reports a theoretical evaluation and findings from teachers’ and students’ evaluations of activities and tasks in English 6, an English textbook from a series of four textbooks which have been used as the compulsory textbooks for all students from grades 6 to 9 (ages 12 to 16) in all junior secondary schools in Vietnam since 2001 (Nguyen, 2005). It presents results from a study which involved 8 teachers and 126 students in four secondary schools in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. Combining a theoretical evaluation and the analysis of the data collected from the questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and classroom observation. It is concluded that there is a lack of a variety of activities and tasks and they mostly focus on form. Therefore, they do not help develop learners’ communicative competence. The present study also draws implications regarding how to use teaching materials effectively for EFL/ESL for developing learners’ communicative competence.