Investigating English Textbooks in Iran’s Schools in Terms of Inclusion of the Elements of Spoken )Grammar of English (SGE

The new findings of corpus linguistics clearly attest to the uniqueness of some elements of the spoken grammar of English and their distinction from those of the written variety. This investigation has adopted a content analytic procedure and applied the models proposed by Cullen and Kuo’s (2007) to the dialogs and Timmis’s (2005) to the tasks of the English school textbooks in Iran, namely the Prospect and Vision series to reveal to what extent, if any, the series have availed themselves of the properties of the spoken grammar in their student books ,workbooks and teacher guides. The findings revealed that the majority of the characteristics of the spoken grammar, as used in the textbooks, belong to the fixed lexico-grammatical elements of Category II of Cullen and Kuo's framework, and that the instances of Category I, that is, those forms which undergo change as a function of the context in which they occur, are relatively uncommon. Additionally, the realizations of Category III, that is, those structures which are deemed ungrammatical via adoption of a prescriptive outlook but are still commonly found in the spoken English, were non-existent in the series. The analysis of the tasks based on Timmis’ (2005) also revealed that only some “global understanding” and very few instances of “language discussion task” were present and focused on in the materials investigated, leaving the two other principles unattended.