Evaluating the Speaking Tasks of Grade 12 English Textbook from Communicative Task Principles and Teachers' and Students' Perspectives

ABSTRACT The main purpose of this study was to evaluate the speaking tasks of English for Ethiopian grade 12 students’ textbook based on communicative task principles. Assess the teachers’ and students’ perception towards the speaking tasks as well as the implementation of the speaking tasks was one of the vital issues in this study. The speaking tasks were analyzed based on the checklist suggested by Nunan (1989) which focuses on the bases of components of communicative tasks (goals, inputs, activities, roles and settings) as well as the speaking activities were treated based on the nature of communicative activities. In order to achieve the designed objectives, descriptive study was employed. Data were collected through content analysis, students’ questionnaire, teachers’ interview and observation. The important raw data were collected from grade 12 English textbook, grade 12 English teacher’s guide, and 90 grade twelve students and 3 grade 12 English teachers’ one government preparatory school. To analyze the data the researcher used both qualitative and quantitative methods were used. The collected data was analyzed both through tabulation, word or concept, percent as well as numerically. The findings of this study revealed that most of the components of the textbook more or less meet the criteria set for communicative tasks. The goals of the speaking tasks were expressed explicitly in the textbook. Most of the speaking activities are appropriate with the goals and the input data. However, the tasks do not involve as many nonverbal inputs and most of them are inauthentic. In addition to this most of the activities were pedagogic rational than real world, so the activities are fixed in the classroom than thus do not allow the students speaking skill out of the class. In the other hand the speaking activities promote pair and group work, but the activities were mostly designed by repeated way and do not motivate as well as appeal students to do cooperatively. The roles of teachers and students are not explicitly stated in the textbook, but they are clearly stated in the teacher’s guide. Even though most of the speaking tasks are suitable for the classroom settings, they are limited only in the classroom and they have no flexibility to be done out of the classroom. Based on the findings of the curriculum planners, syllabus designers, and textbook writers should consider varieties nonverbal inputs while developing materials. Speaking activities, instructions, guiding questions, model examples as well as explicit prompts should be incorporated in the sections of the speaking tasks.