Developing Learners’ Interactive Competence through the Speaking Skill: Evaluation of Third Year Secondary School Textbook New Prospects.

Abstract

The present research attempts to evaluate the third year secondary school EFL textbook: New Prospects. It seeks to investigate first, to what extent the speaking activities included in the corpus under study are communicative; and then, to what extent they help to develop learners’ interactive competence. To achieve this goal, two analytical frameworks are used: first, Litllewood’s (1996) classification of communicative activities and second, Jones’ (1996) three functions of speaking. To collect and interpret data, we have used quantitative analysis and qualitative content analysis. The obtained results demonstrate that New Prospects speaking activities help to some extent to develop learners’ interactive competence. It has been found that communication and interactive competence are stressed to some extent in New Prospects. The results reveal that 60% of the speaking activities are pre-communicative activities while 40% are communicative. This indicates that New Prospects tasks are not all communicatively directing. Structural practice is significantly emphasized in New Prospects since the percentage of the structural activities is 67% and quasi-communicative activities are 33%. Concerning the interactive competence, the activities provide learners with opportunities to interact in the classroom and they are in favor of developing some interactive skills for learners. However, there are some limitations in this concern.