the language they have learned in the classroom in real life. Grant 1987:14 clarifies the characteristics of communicative textbooks as
follows: 1. They emphasize the communicative functions of
language – the jobs people do using the language – not just the forms.
2. They try to reflect the students’ needs and interests 3. They emphasize skills in using the language, not just the
forms of language, and they are therefore activity-based 4. They usually have a good balance among the four
language skills, but may emphasize listening and speaking more than a traditional textbook does.
5. They emphasize fluency, not just accuracy. The communicative books are still being developed in the present era. It is
a new approach in the writing of textbooks material to support and to help teachers and students in EFL classroom. On the basis of communicative
competence, the textbooks published hopefully written based on the principle of communicative textbooks.
2.3. Text and Discourse
When we think of a stretch of language complete in itself and of some considerable extent: a business letter, a leaflet, a news report, a recipe and so
on. However, though these view texts may be commonsensical, there appears to be a problem when we have to define units of language which consist of a
single sentence, or even a single word, which are all the same experienced as texts because they full fill the basic requirements of forming a meaningful
whole in their own right. Typical examples of such small-scale texts are public notices like “KEEP OF THE GRASS’, KEEP LEFT,’KEEP-
OUT’,’DANGER’,SLOW and ‘EXIT’. It is obvious that these minimal texts
are meaningful in themselves, and therefore do not need a particular structural patterning with other language units. In other words they are complete in
terms of communicative meaning. Consider the road sign ‘RAMP HEAD’. When we are driving a car
and see this sign, we interpret it as warning that there will be as small hump on the road a head of us and that it is therefore wise to slow down when we
drive over it. From this it follows that we recognize a piece of language as text, not because of its length, but because of its location in a particular
context. And if we are familiar with the text in that context, we know what the message is intended to be. Widdowson 2007:6 states that “people produce
text to get message across, to express ideas, to explain something, to get other people to do certain things or to think a certain way and so on”. Based on the
previous quotation, it is known that in common people produce text in order to be able to express their ideas, to explain something and so on
Systemic functional theory views language as social semiotic resource. It means people accomplish their purposes by expressing meaning in context.
To express meaning people create text. Text has similar meaning to discourse. In common, Linguist prefers text than discourse. It is because people in
common are familiar with the word text than discourse. Widdowson 2007:4 defines a text as “an actual use of language”. The text is produced as for a
communicative purpose. Discourse or text can be natural spoken or written language, with meaning being transferred through the sentences of a text, in a
particular context. However, a piece of discourse in context can consist of as
little as one or two words, as in “Stop” or “Stop Smoking”. Halliday and Hasan 1985:10 describe text as language that is functional. Functional means
that language doing some job in the context.
2.4. Spoken and Written Language
