Linguistic Contents in Grades 5-8 English Textbooks

The organization of the textbooks shows that attention is predominantly given to language skills and functions, with little consideration of grammar and vocabulary. The grammar rules are presented in a deductive approach that gives some explanations of the rules followed by few examples and exercises. The strengths observed in the textbooks are inclusion of topics related to culture, environment, social life, education and other things that are relevant to students' lives. However, lack of specification and separation of skills and grammar items, lack of useful extensive grammar references, glossaries and other communicative activities as appendices, and lack of summaries in all the units are considered as weaknesses of the textbooks. The textbooks have problems in presenting grammar rules repeatedly in a progressive way in consecutive grades, resulting in problems of rehearsal. Moreover, contexts are not provided for many of the contents of the textbooks: there are no dialogues and/or conversation, language drills, and language games that could make students learn the grammar items with interest.

Autorentext

Eba Teresa was born in western part of Oromia (Ilu Gelan). He received his BEd degree from Debub University, Ethiopia, in 2005. He has been teaching in a university college for three academic years.In 2010, he received his MA degree in General Linguistics from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia.