Multidimentional analysis of spoken discourse in textbooks of English as a foreign language

Textbooks for teaching English as a foreign language include a variety of activities for the development of listening comprehension. However, there is no information about the tinguistic characteristics of pre-recorded discourse with teaching purposes, nor about the degree of authenticity of these oral texts, that is to say, its similarity with natural, spontaneous speech in real comunicative situations. Therefore, the objective of the study is to determine the degree of adequacy of oral discourse present in two groups of textbooks used to develop listening comprehension, those used in public schools and those used in private bilingual schools in Vina del Mar, Chile. Especifically, the frequency count and co-ocurrence of a set of pre-determined linguistic features allow determining how monologues and dialogues in the Global Corpus Publico-Privado distribute throughout the seven dimensions of linguistic variation in English established by Biber (1988, 2004). Data analysis reveals that although both groups of textbooks display the same Linguistic features which are present in natural English discourse, there are significant differences between the two different groups of textbooks in some of the previously mentioned dimensions.