What Goes Around Comes Around: Proverbs in Books Used to Teach English to Future EFL Teachers in Turkey

What Goes Around Comes Around: Proverbs in Books Used to Teach English to Future EFL Teachers in Turkey

Hatipoglu , Ciler
Can , Nilufer

In EFL settings, coursebooks are the main materials teachers depend on to teach the target language. Therefore, these materials should be designed to meet the needs and expectations of language learners (i.e., should help learners develop their communicative competence (CC)) (Celce-Murcia 2001). This need is even more apparent in the case of teacher trainees as language learners; before attaining pedagogic competence in the teacher education institution, teacher trainees need to attain CC so that they are not side-tracked by language weaknesses in their professional development (Cross, 1995:3). The aim of this study was to uncover whether or not the EFL books used in Anatolian Teacher Training High Schools (ATTHS) in Turkey help future language teachers develop their CC by providing enough information and instruction on proverbs, which are claimed to make an important contribution to the development of each of the competences in Bachman’s CC framework (Littlemore & Low, 2006). The data collection and analyses for this study were done in three stages: (1) a questionnaire was employed to identify the coursebooks used in ATTHS; (2) an analysis form was designed to identify the number, form of the proverbs and the way (method and purpose) they were presented in the selected coursebooks; (3) a checklist was designed to uncover the aspects of proverbs that were explicitly dealt with in these coursebooks. The results of the study showed that while the scrutinised local coursebooks contained only a few proverbs, the analysed international coursebooks included a relatively bigger number of proverbs. However, except for some of the semantic and cultural aspects of proverbs, there were hardly any explicit references to other aspects of proverbs in the examined coursebooks and a considerably big number of the proverbs included in the books were not among the frequently used ones by native speakers of English.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012-05

809