Evaluation of “Ready for First Certificate of English”: Microstructural Approach

Abstract

Despite much research done on language learning textbooks, there still exist several questions unanswered about what these textbooks’ contents are about. This study is thus an attempt to investigate the 15 reading passages of Ready for First Certificate of English (FCE) in the light of schema theory. In doing so, the microstructural approach to schema theory was taken into the account which led to the classification of 8617 schema tokens into the three main categories of syntactic, semantic, and parasyntactic domains. Running the chi-square test revealed that the domains differ significantly from each other regarding both their types (X2= 2869.9, p< 0.05) and tokens (X2= 1704, p< 0.05) which lent support to their psychological reality. In addition, the descriptive analysis of the schemata demonstrated that reading passages are heavily outweighed by semantic types (80.7%), whereas syntactic ad parasyntactic types were only about 6% and 12.4 % respectively. The pedagogical implication of the study is discussed and further suggestions are put forward.