Pragmatic input in newly-published national English textbooks for Vietnamese students

The critical review of the relevant literature shows that there is a gap between what research in pragmatics has found and how the English language is taught and learnt in EFL classrooms. Additionally, recent research studies in EFL contexts generally and in Vietnam particularly also find that pragmatic knowledge is under-represented in EFL textbooks. Therefore, the present study was conducted to explore whether the newly-published national EFL textbook series for Vietnamese upper-secondary school students includes adequate pragmatic input to facilitate students' development of communicative competence in English as set out in the goal of the National Foreign Language Project 2020. The results show that this series includes a low level of explicit information about pragmatics, which accounts for only 5.5 per cent of the students' books pages and does not appear at all in the teachers' books. In addition, the presentations of different pragmatic aspects including general pragmatic information, speech acts, and pragmatic tasks were found to be inadequate according to current theories of L2 pragmatics teaching. On the basis of its findings, the present study supports the need for stakeholders including teachers, textbook writers, and policy-makers to supplement this textbook series with input and tasks that can increase pragmatic knowledge.