Communicative Learning in Teaching Materials: A Study of Speaking Tasks in Contemporary Grade-8 English Textbooks in China and Sweden

Currently, Communicative Language Teaching has been popular around the world and has a profound effect on second language acquisition since the 1970s. For Communicative Language Teaching to be successful, there is a need for appropriate teaching materials. This paper analyzes speaking tasks in Chinese and Swedish textbooks for grade 8,Go for it and Magic. The analysis presents content analysis, providing a general overview of speaking tasks found in both textbooks. First, task description is analyzed, which provides the pupils with the topics of tasks in both textbooks. It will be seen if the topics are real-life. Second, types of speaking, text type, cognitive processes, focus, classroom organization are quantitively analyzed to see if there are different approaches to Communicative Language Teaching between Chinese and Swedish textbooks. Through comparison of these six aspects in different textbooks, there are three similar approaches to Communicative Language Teaching: First, they both have real-world topics under which there are many real-world speaking tasks. Second, the dialogues play a main role in both textbooks. Third, pair and group work have dominant position in these two books. Also there are three different approaches to Communicative Language Teaching: First, the Chinese textbook is directed towards accuracy while the Swedish textbook is directed towards fluency. Second, the Chinese textbook focuses on form whereas the Swedish textbook focuses on meaning. Third, there is an information-gap approach in the Chinese textbook where tasks based on information gap are obviously labeled. However, it cannot be found in the Swedish textbook.