PRESUPOSITIONS IN ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS FOR SCECONDARY SCHOOLS IN PUNJAB PAKISTAN: A CORPUS-DRIVEN ANALYSIS

Abstract

This studyaims to explore the role of presupposition in English Language Teaching (ELT) material to determine its utilization for developing the students’ comprehension of concepts and foster their engagement with the text. The researcherhasdemonstrated how accurate presupposition can bebeneficial for learning and how a wrong onecan cause incomprehension. The findings of this study are insightful for textbook developers, teachers, andstudents because ithas been emphasized how presuppositions shape an effective pedagogical content which is understandable and relevant to the learner’s background. The research was carried outon MAXQDA software to study a corpus of 9^th and 10^thgrade English textbooks of Punjab,          Pakistan (PTB). Data was analyzed using Yule’s (2006) and Levinson’s presupposition frameworks, and a mixed-method research approach was applied. The results has revealed that existential presupposition was prevalent with the frequency of 2898, and 2549 in the 9^th and 10^thgrade textbooks respectively, whereas factive presupposition was the least frequent type with 29 occurrencesin 9^th-grade and 34 in 10^th-grade textbooks. Such frequent use of existential presupposition highlights the fact that they may be more resonant to the context in terms of culture than the factive presuppositions which shows a gap in pedagogy. In addition, the research emphasized requirement of a more balanced and inclusive content related to language exposure, ensuring relevancy with student’s cultural, religious, social, and cognitive backgrounds.The ELT material which is more socially, contextually and culturally oriented always improveunderstanding and intercultural competency among learners.