Element of Progression in English Language Textbooks at Elementary Level in Pakistan: A Case Study

Abstract

The curriculum policy of Pakistan (1998-2010) favours a developmental model of curriculum with notional functional syllabus and CLT as its teaching methodology. While using questionnaire and interview as their tools for research, the ELT experts criticize the curriculum as well as the instructional material provided to the learners in Pakistani Government sector schools. The present research is an attempt to incorporate computer tools to shift the curriculum-related research to scientific grounds. It is a descriptive, quantitative study. It computes the ratio of new and old linguistic items on lexical and phrase level by using Compleat Lexical Tutor as the tool for research. The quantitative analysis yields the percentage of repeated items, which turn out to be quite low for the reason that a large number of text types have not been repeated. It also shows that the representation of the lexical items does not follow a cyclic process which leads to shaky foundation of English language at learners’ end. It is concluded that this abrupt introduction of new lexical items and grammatical structures in instructional materials (textbooks) poses considerable difficulty for learners to take a good grasp of English language.

Keywords: Curriculum, Syllabus, Elementary Education in Pakistan, textbook         analysis, ELT