Conversation Closings in English Language Teaching Textbooks

This article will discuss the results of English Language Teaching (ELT) textbook analysis on closing conversation. Understanding how to end a conversation is as important as how to begin a conversation for successful communication in English. Lack in the knowledge about how to end a conversation or inappropriate and impolite way of closing a conversation may lead to communication breakdown. To be able to communicate successfully in English, knowledge about rituals on closing a conversation is important. It is assumed that the role of instructional materials such as ELT textbooks is essential as information resources for Japanese EFL students to learn pragmatic information including information about how to end a conversation. However, instructional materials often lack in pragmatic information for learners to acquire pragmatic competence. ELT textbooks often introduce greetings in the first unit; however, it seems they do not place the same importance on conversational closing. To investigate how conversational closing is introduced in ELT textbooks, in total, nineteen ELT textbooks were collected for this study. All of the collected textbooks will be analyzed in terms of whether conversational closing is introduced or not and what steps of shut-down, pre-closing, and terminal exchange are introduced if conversational closings are introduced. Based on the analysis, it will be discussed how conversational closing should be introduced for pedagogical instruction using currently available ELT textbooks.