A Social Semiotic Analysis of the Teaching of Speaking Skill in EFL Textbooks: New Prospects and Bridges

Abstract

The present study compares the teaching of the speaking skill in two secondary third year EFL textbooks: the Algerian New Prospects and Bridges, which is French. It investigates classroom speaking activities with Brown’s (2004) classification of classroom speaking performance and the representation of culture in the visuals of this section using social semiotics approach, Grammar of Visual Design by Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006). This dissertation reaches a number of results: the questions of both textbooks target the same type of classroom speaking performance though with different focuses. They both neglect the same types of speaking activities. Moreover, the visuals of New Prospects and Bridges include different cultural representations. The main conclusion drawn from this work is that though both EFL textbooks’ objective is the teaching of the communicative competence, each one concentrates on a different strategy. Moreover, they neglect practices, namely imitative and intensive questions, which proved their efficiency in communication development. Furthermore, they do not follow the same principle in their representations of culture. When New Prospects makes use of the three EFL textbooks’ types of cultures suggested by Cortazzi and Jin (1999), Bridges concentrates on the target culture only.