Introductions and Practices of 'Responses' in Oral Communication 1 Textbooks: From a Viewpoint of Interlanguage Pragmatics (Applied Linguistics)

Being able to make an appropriate response in a given situation is, needless to say, an essential ability for successful communication in a second language as well as in a mother tongue.Furnishing students with this ability is also listed as one of the goals of communicative activities conducted in an "Oral Communication 1" course in the guidelines for high school English education set by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Sports, Culture, Science and Technology (MEXT).Considering this point, the present study follows our recent study on currently used Oral Communication 1 textbooks in terms of "speech acts" taught in them (Shimizu, Fukasawa, & Yonekura, 2007).It examines how "responses" to those speech acts are dealt with in the same 17 textbooks.The analyses were conducted from the following viewpoints: 1) how many speech act types are introduced along with subsequent responses; 2) how many linguistic forms are introduced to carry out such responses; 3) whether such responses are explicitly introduced; 4) whether the opportunity for practicing the introduced linguistic forms is provided in the following exercises; and 5) whether responses both favorable and unfavorable to the interlocutor are evenly introduced.The study revealed that although the majority of the Oral Communication 1 textbooks present some model samples of response to most of the explicitly introduced speech acts, the number of linguistic forms used in such responses varies among the textbooks.It also found that the textbooks have a serious dearth of explicitly introduced forms of responses, proper exercises for practicing the introduced forms, and samples of unfavorable responses.1 The pilot study for this paper was presented at the 33rd International Conference of the Japan Association for Language Teaching on November 23, 2007.The present study has been considerably advanced in terms of analytical methods and scope of target upon reflecting on the comments and suggestions from the audience.We would like to express our sincere gratitude to them for their interest, encouragement, helpful suggestions and comments on our study.