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Koji Osawa, Kyoto Tachibana University, JapanAbstract
The concept of genres has helped second language (L2) learners improve their literacy, including reading and writing skills, by raising their awareness of how a context in reading and writing tasks is connected to lexical and grammatical resources to achieve its social purpose. In particular, genres included in schooling have been adopted as L2 literacy pedagogy, textbook design, and curriculum development in many countries over the past decades to prepare L2 learners for successful academic study. Although many studies on textbook design from the genre perspective have been conducted in English as a second language contexts, those in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts are relatively scarce. In particular, those at primary and secondary school levels have not been sufficiently explored. This presentation aims to demonstrate how literacy tasks in EFL textbooks are organized from the perspective of genres of schooling. The selected textbooks are seven different nationally approved textbooks for Japanese primary schools (for year 5-6 students), in which a new curriculum started to be implemented in 2020 and put a stronger focus on L2 literacy development than the prior one. Interestingly, the finding from the analysis shows a clear difference in the distribution of genres among the literacy tasks of the seven textbooks. The pedagogical implication of this study is that the analytical framework could help L2 teachers and learners improve their awareness of what social purpose can be achieved by completing literacy tasks.
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