Examining Adaptation Practices in English Language Textbooks

Authentic texts in English Language Teaching (ELT) textbooks are highly valued for their ability to provide learners with exposure to real-world language. In Portuguese ELT textbooks, very often authentic texts are marked as "adapted", but few discussions have been raised about how they are adapted in ELT textbooks and what elements are considered during text adaptation. Given the central role textbooks play in language teaching and learning, examining textbook writers' adaptation practices can help teachers make informed choices about how to best use such materials. The goal of this paper is to examine the nature of text adaptations in Portuguese ELT textbooks and the extent to which authentic texts are modified. To accomplish this, two corpora have been manually compiled: one consisting of 37 adapted texts extracted from two Portuguese ELT textbooks, and the other comprising their unmodified, authentic counterparts. Each adapted text was compared to its corresponding original source using a predefined set of criteria. Findings reveal that adapted texts differ from the authentic source with respect to size, while changes at the level of language, such as modifications to vocabulary and syntax, are very rare.