Abstract:
To be communicatively competent, speaking and listening skills
are two of the four macro-skills to be given importance. However, teaching
these two is highly neglected in Bangladeshi classrooms as there have been
no initiatives to assess them although the prescribed textbooks English For
Today: Classes Nine-Ten and English For Today: Classes Eleven-Twelve by
the National Curriculum and Textbook Board, Bangladesh (NCTB) assign
speaking and listening tasks to perform in CLT methodology, which
Bangladesh introduced in 2001 (Rahman & Karim, 2015). This study
investigates how much emphasis these two set books have given to the two
neglected skills i.e., speaking and listening by comparing the tasks assigned
in the books. Also, this paper attempts to find out the classroom practices of
these activities in reality. To achieve these aims, the books were evaluated
following a textbook evaluation checklist. Five teachers teaching English in
classes 9-10 and 11-12 were interviewed and 50 students in classes 9-10 and
11-12 were given questionnaires to know the actuality of classroom practices
following the activities in the books. The study shows that the books have a
range of listening and speaking activities though little exposure to speaking
and listening activities is made in classrooms and there is no sufficient
logistic support or motivation (i.e., central assessment) for the actualization
of them.
Keywords: Speaking, Listening, Textbook, Secondary Level, EFL, CLT
