A Qualitative Analysis of Subjectverb Agreement in Upper Secondary English Textbooks

Sammanfattning

Subject–verb agreement refers to when the subject and verb agree in terms of number and person. Estling Vannestål (2020) claims that many students struggle with this rule regardless of their mother tongue. Källkvist and Petersson (2005) claim that the correct use of subject–verb agreement is challenging for Swedish learners of English. Ruin (1996) found that S/V concord is at the top of the error list among advanced learners. This demonstrates the existence of this error among learners at every level. Teaching materials are essential in the learning process. Therefore, it is important to investigate how S/V concord is explained in teaching materials. However, there are not many studies in this area, and there is a need to fill the research gap. This study aims to explore how subject–verb agreement is presented in upper secondary school textbooks. To do so, eight upper secondary English textbooks were chosen and analysed to investigate how S/V agreement is presented, described, and practiced in these books. In addition, the study investigates the extent to which these books use explicit and implicit approaches to teaching this rule. A qualitative comparative analysis was conducted to answer the research questions. The results show that one of the textbooks for English 1, Pick & Mix 1, contains more explanations and examples compared to the other books. However, Solid Gold 1 contains the most exercises regarding subject–verb agreement. In English 2, all three books ( Viewpoints 2, 2nd and 3rd eds. and Pick & Mix 2) contain extensive explanations and exercises. For English 3, only Echo 3 was analysed, and it demonstrates that the book is effective in presenting subject–verb agreement, although the number of exercises is limited. Furthermore, all of the books use an explicit approach to teaching subject–verb agreement. Since the present study analysed only one English 3 textbook, future research could analyse more textbooks from this level of upper secondary school to obtain more reliable results.