Learning activities in the context of Primary School EFL textbooks

Abstract

Attaining the necessary fluency in the oral and written skills is one of the fundamental goals that EFL students need to pursue. Different activities in textbooks can have different explicit and implicit teaching loads depending on the type of knowledge promoted. Therefore, the kind of knowledge achieved by EFL learners might depend greatly on the typology of activities that teachers implement. Insofar as younger learners seem to benefit more from activities whose focus is communicative (hence, with a higher implicit teaching potential), the objective of the present exploratory study is to examine the explicit and implicit teaching potential of a sample of 1.952 activities taken from 10 primary school EFL textbooks used in Spain. Results revealed that the proportion of form-focused activities is higher than expected in the context of EFL textbooks for primary school teaching.

Keywords

• escuela primaria
• inglés como lengua extranjera
• potencial de enseñanza explícita e implícita
• corpus de actividades