An Analysis of the way Grammar is Presented in two Coursebooks for English as a Second Language : A Qualitative Conceptual Analysis of Grammar in Swedish Coursebooks for Teaching English

Abstract: This essay aims to investigate theoretically how two currently used coursebooks, What’s Up 9 and Solid Gold 1, in a local area of Southern Sweden, present (introduces and covers) grammar. The overall aim is to investigate how grammar is presented, using the present simple and the present continuous as examples. The findings are also mapped to teaching approaches, as well as SLA (Second Language Acquisition) research, to see what approaches are favoured for teaching grammar in the first decades of the 21st century. In order to investigate the course- books, a qualitative content analysis and conceptual analysis was chosen with the presentation of grammar mapped into different categories, by using concepts for teaching and approaches used in SLA. The results show that the two proposed coursebooks favoured a FoFs (Focus on Forms) approach for presenting grammar. Furthermore, the results show that grammar is pre- sented explicitly and, if the teachers use the structures proposed in the coursebook rigidly, they automatically follow a deductive teaching procedure. When using a FoFs, explicit instructions and taking a deductive teaching approach, it may be regarded as the coursebooks suggest a grammar-translation approach as well. However, when observing other exercises connected to the reading texts in the coursebooks, it was detected that both coursebooks favoured a text- based approach for teaching, where the learners are supposed to learn the structure of different texts. In doing so, the grammatical structures are learned subconsciously and implicitly, which indicates that grammar is, in general, taught implicitly in the coursebooks, but presented (intro- duced and covered) explicitly.