An Evaluation of Preposition Representation in the Omani Basic Education ELT Textbooks

Abstract

The chapter employed a corpus-based approach to evaluate the representation of prepositions in the Omani Basic Education English language teaching (ELT) school textbooks in Grades 1-4. In doing so, it sought to investigate English preposition distribution patterns in the textbooks in order to understand more about how Omani learners are introduced to them. To achieve this, a corpus of Omani ELT school textbooks was used and a qualitative page-by-page content analysis performed through manual content analysis. Findings indicate that prepositions were not presented with enough frequency for learners to be adequately exposed to them across all grades. Moreover, results suggest that the textbook writers have not considered the frequency distribution of patterns of prepositions during the textbook design phase. Practical implications of these results are offered.