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The purpose of this study is to present the importance of stress in communicative language teaching and to find out how pronunciation and English stress are presented in the English textbooks for Korean middle school students. Six types of middle school English textbooks were used for the research analysis and the results were as follows. First, the pronunciation parts were very limited (less than 2% in a lesson) in the current textbooks. Second, textbooks ignored the general rules of stress―one of which was the standardized transcription method of stress. Third, most textbooks focused only on a single type of stress patterns, such as word stress or sentence stress. Consequently, the frequency of the stress presentation in the textbooks were very limited and the explanations of stress were quite unsystematic. In conclusion, to improve students’ communicative competence in English, 1) textbooks should increase pronunciation sections including stress materials; 2) the transcription method of stress should be more clear and precise in textbooks to reduce students’ confusion; 3) textbooks need to expand the scope of English stress to prepare for various communication situations. Moreover, the communicative value of stress should be widely recognized among teachers and students