Analysis of Presupposition Triggers in English Reading Textbooks: Learners’ Familiarity
Öz
This study aimed to investigate the presupposition usage in English reading textbooks and students’ familiarity with them. 14 reading texts in a reading book were analyzed to see the amount of presupposition triggers used and 34 B2 level students were included in the study to find out to what extent they are familiar with presuppositions used in their reading textbook. The reading texts were analyzed based on Yule’s (2006) categorization of presupposition triggers consisting of six different categories: existential, factive, lexical, structural, non-factive and counter-factual (pp.30). The students were given a survey consisting of randomly chosen six sentences from the readings representing each presupposition category and asked to choose ‘yes’ if they are familiar with the presuppositions or ‘no’ if they are not familiar with the presuppositions. The results clearly showed that the presuppositions are not widely used in the reading texts. Lexical and existential presupposition triggers are the most commonly used types among all the triggers. The results also indicated that students’ familiarity with the content and presuppositions will help them understand the content better.
Anahtar Kelimeler
Kaynakça
- ReferencesArikan, A. (2008). Topics of reading passages in ELT course books: What do our students really read?. The Reading Matrix, 8(2), 70-85.Bonyadi, A. & Samuel, M. (2011). Linguistic nature of presupposition in American and Persian newspaper editorials. International Journal of Linguistics, 3, 1-16. Davoudi, M. (2005). Inference generation skill and text comprehension. The Reading Matrix, 5(1), 106-123.Grant, L. & Starks, D. (2001). Screening appropriate teaching materials: Closing from textbooks and television soap operas. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 39, 39-50.Karttunen, L. (1973). Presuppositions of compound sentences. Linguistic Inquiry, 4(2), 169-193. Keenan, E. L. (1971). Two kinds of presupposition in natural language in Fillmore and Langendoen, Studies in Linguistic Semantics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Khaleel, L. M. (2010). An analysis of presupposition triggers in English journalistic texts. J. of College of Education for Women, 21(2), 523-551.Kim, D. & Hall, J. K. (2002). The role of an interactive book reading program in the development of second language pragmatic competence. Modern Language Journal, 86, 332-348.
- Potts, C. (2015). Presuppositions and implicature. In Shalom, L. & Chris, F. (Eds.), The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory, 168-202. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Schwarz, F. (2007). Processing presupposed content. Journal of Semantics, 24, 373-416.Vellenga, H. (2004). Learning pragmatics from ESL & EFL textbooks: How likely?. The Electronic Journal for English as a Second Language, 8(2). Retrieved from: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume8/ej30/ej30a3/Yule, G. (2006). Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ayrıntılar
Birincil Dil
İngilizce
Konular
Eğitim Üzerine Çalışmalar
Bölüm
Araştırma Makalesi
Yazarlar
Savaş Gençtürk
*
Türkiye
Yayımlanma Tarihi
8 Ekim 2018
Gönderilme Tarihi
6 Haziran 2018
Kabul Tarihi
29 Ağustos 2018
Yayımlandığı Sayı
Yıl 2018 Cilt: 1 Sayı: 1