Representation of Teaching Speaking Skill in Persian Language Textbooks Based on Communicative Approach: A Case Study of Mina Textbooks

One of the teaching approaches that has received much attention in language teaching so far is the communicative approach. It has led to the practical and interactive use of a foreign language. The present study aims to represent the communicative approach in teaching speaking skill in Mina textbooks of teaching Persian to non-Persian speakers. To this end, the literature review related to the research topic has been studied in order to prepare a checklist for evaluating the communicative approach in teaching speaking skill based on some experts’ viewpoints in the communicative education filed. Then, the speaking activities of every three books of Mina have been detected and sorted in three classifications of individual activities, two-person activities and group activities. After observing and analyzing these speaking-based activities, values and criteria of the named checklist have been examined and rated according to the Likert scale. According to the observations and results in this study, it can be said that teaching the speaking-based contents of Mina textbooks are possible only by means of communicative language teaching, as the authors of these textbooks claim. This claim is particularly obvious to a large extent in the first and the third volume of Mina textbooks, while in the second volume despite including topics and interactive situations related to real life, there has been few oral production activities which help the learners to practice their speaking skill.