“I'm putting some salt in my sandwich.” The use of the progressive in EFL textbook conversation

Abstract

Previous studies have claimed that the progressive is frequently over- and misrepresented in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks (e.g. Römer 2005). This paper compares the representation of progressives in the dialogues of nine series of secondary school EFL textbooks (43 volumes) to the Spoken BNC2014. The frequencies, morphosyntactic and functional aspects of progressive constructions, such as contraction, negation, framing and time reference, are investigated. Collostructional analysis is used to explore the lexical associations of the progressive. A number of idiosyncratic uses of the progressive in textbook conversation are highlighted and pedagogical implications discussed. In particular, key conversational discourse-structuring phrasemes in the progressive are found to be critically underrepresented. © 2022 John Benjamins Publishing Company.