抄録
The new Course of Study, which was revised in 2008, promotes balanced
allocation of four skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) in designing
lessons, and addresses an important role of grammar which is assumed to
underpin communication activities. This study has compared the
communication tasks in new textbooks published by four major publishers to
investigate how communication tasks differ according to the publishers, grades,
and sections of the textbooks. Following Usuda et al. (2012), this study used the
criteria of task-likeliness: interactional requirement of pair or group work, focus
on message, requirement of outcome, explicitness of task completion, and
authenticity (Skehan, 1998; Ellis, 2003; Willis & Willis, 2007). The results
showed that many of the tasks in Publisher C, which contain information gaps,
were rated most task-likely, especially with respect to the outcome. Such
tendency was observed all through the textbooks, or regardless of the sections of
the textbooks. With respect to the grades, there were two publishers in which
the textbooks for the second-and third-year students were rated more task-likely
than those for the first-year students; however the other two publishers did not
reveal such a feasible organization of the textbooks. Such diversity was also
observed with respect to the sections of the textbooks.
