Moral Values Representation in Primary School English Textbooks: An Analysis of Speech Acts

Abstract

Moral values are inextricably connected to society's daily life. Those values should be instilled to the students through school subjects, including English, since the primary level as mandated by the Indonesian Government to build character education. Several researches on moral values representation in textbooks have been increasing in recent years, however, little evidence reports how speech acts are used to represent moral values in speaking activities in English textbooks for primary school students. This qualitative study aims (1) to identify the kinds of speech acts used to show moral values and (2) to investigate the representation of moral values in speaking activities in two English textbooks produced by national publishers. The data were collected through documentary analysis to find the utterances which indicated the speech acts. Then the data were analyzed by applying six steps:  unitizing, sampling, recording/coding, reducing, inferring, and narrating (Krippendorf, 2004). The findings show that Expressive and Directive are the most dominant speech acts in 5th-grade English textbook, while Assertive is the speech act with the highest percentage in 4th-grade book which represent moral values in speaking activities. Moreover, honesty and curiosity are the most dominant values depicted in two elementary school English textbooks.