A Study of Textbook Input to Facilitate Communicative Output-with Reference to Wh-questions

The purpose of this article is to make a proposal for designing tasks to fill the gap between structural practice and communicative tasks. The recent communicative trends in English language education encourage both teachers and learners to engage in meaningful or communicative output activities soon after the structural practice stage, expecting the learners to attain the communicative stage on their own. However, the EFL classroom usually does not provide the learners with real communicative needs to try a variety of expressions. Also, EFL learners are at disadvantage because they cannot directly observe sufficient adequate positive evidence which might serve as models in performing the task. For the kind of noticing that Schmidt (1993) described to take place, the learner must have an observable model. Based upon a survey of junior high school English textbooks, this study points out that junior high school English textbooks in Japan do not include ample adequate post-structural or pre-communicative exercises which smoothly relate the structural stage to the communicative stage and this might be a cause for failure to communicate fluently in autonomous output activities. Finally, some post-structural output activities are suggested to facilitate communicative output