Grammar exercises in English textbooks: An analysis of exercises in English textbooks in Sweden

Abstract: The role of grammar in language teaching has been a highly debated topic for several years. With the debate on how grammar should be taught, textbooks are one way of investigating how grammar is taught currently in schools. This study investigates how grammar exercises are incorporated in English textbooks for English 6 in upper secondary in Lund. Through a questionnaire and an analysis of grammar exercises in the three English textbooks Context 2, Viewpoint 2, and Blueprint B the study investigates how the exercises can be categorized. The focus is on categorization after the task type that the exercise requests. Furthermore, the study investigates if there is any connection between the categories and the cognitive, behaviorist, and communicative perspectives of language theories. The study finds that the cognitive and behaviorist perspective can be connected to the three most frequently occurring exercise categories, gap sentences, rewrite sentences and translation exercises. Furthermore, the results also show that there is a significant difference between the number of exercises in the three most occurring categories which contain 86 percent of the exercises in the three books. The remaining 14 percent contains the three categories, pair work, create sentence, and meta-questions. These results suggest that there is a difference between different textbooks and the exercise types that they provide. The essay final gives suggestions on how these results can be taken into consideration when working with grammar and textbooks.