Conversational implicature in junior high school textbooks

Abstract

Textbooks in the EFL classroom play role as the material content provider. They often present formal and well-structured pattern of standardized English since texts, dialogues, and other aspects of content tend to be specially written to corporate teaching points. This research is conducted to examine the content of textbooks, particularly the short conversations found in English textbooks used by the seventh and eighth grades of junior high school students in Palangka Raya based on pragmatics point of view. It observes whether the conversations found in junior high school textbooks may contain more examples of conversation following Grice’s cooperative principle/maxim, or tend to have more examples conveying conversational implicatures on them. The result of the analysis shows that out of 33 data, there are 8 (24.2%) conversations which obey Grice’s cooperative principle by applying one or more maxims, whereas the other 25 ones (75.8%) have implicatures embedded in the conversations with their various contextual meanings and different types of conversational implicatures. The discussion in this research article also deals with the result of the research and its relation to the EFL teaching-learning context.