A tool to analyze oral competence development in EFL textbooks

Even though the Common European framework of reference for languages has placed great emphasis on the teaching and learning of oral aspects and there is general agreement about the need to analyze oral competence development through checklists, the inventories developed so far to analyze textbooks are too general, not explicit enough or devote too little space to oral skills. Consequently, there is currently no specific instrument created to evaluate how oral competence is being fostered in English as a Foreign Language textbooks. This paper aims at filling this gap in research by presenting a tool to analyze oral skills development in EFL course books. The checklist was divided in four sections named background information, listening, speaking, and pronunciation, and included quantitative and categorical measures. The tool is presented in an abridged and an extended version to allow for a shorter and a more detailed scrutiny. A preliminary analysis using it showed a highly significant and excellent inter-rater agreement of 0.995 for numerical items and of 0.907 for categorical ones.