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Presenters
Cemal Karata
&
Adem Soruç

Title
How much does spoken grammar find its way through ELT textbooks published in Turkey?

Abstract
The discrepancy between written and spoken grammar of English has been largely identified through corpora studies in the last two decades. These differences show that they are significant enough to be incorporated in textbooks, most of which are extensively dominated by written grammar. The missing link between corpus findings and ELT practices (Cullen & Kuo, 2007) and the slow filter of corpus-based insights into ELT practice (Timmis, 2005) is also observed in Turkey, where recently many of the state schools use textbooks published within the country. This study evaluates English textbooks used in Turkish state schools ranging from primary schools (4-8th grades) to various types of high schools (9-12th grades) from the point of spoken grammar. 13 books used in state schools have been examined page by page using a checklist of spoken grammar forms, like ellipsis, headers, tails, etc. The number of occurrences for each feature has been calculated separately. The ad hoc results indicate that spoken grammar forms are generally not encountered in textbooks adequately with the exception of ellipsis. This study postulates that textbook writers and materials developers should take into account spoken grammar features much more than they do now, especially for those textbooks designed for students with the aim of learning English to be able to communicate with native (and also non-native) speakers. A number of suggestions for the design of textbooks including spoken grammar forms are also included at the end of the paper.

Key words: corpora studies, spoken grammar, written grammar, spoken grammar features, textbook evaluation