An Investigation into the Use of Cohesive Devises in Iranian High School EFL Textbooks

The present study aimed at probing into the use of grammatical and lexical cohesive subdevices in Iranian high school EFL textbooks. To this end, the reading sections of three high school EFL textbooks and one pre-university EFL textbook were analyzed in terms of the distribution of grammatical and lexical cohesive subdevices. The results of Oneway ANOVA illustrated that: a)there are no significant differences among the frequencies of grammatical cohesive subdevices across grade 1 high school EFL textbook and the pre-university EFL textbook, b)there are significant differences among the frequencies of grammatical cohesive subdevices across grades 2 and 3 high school EFL textbooks. Moreover, the results of Chi-Square test showed that the significant values of all of the lexical cohesive subdevices were higher than .05 across each of the Iranian EFL high school textbooks. These findings can be beneficial for textbook writers, materials developers and EFL teachers.