Essay On Textbook Evaluation

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Introduction:

According to Nunan (1988) materials represent the essential parts of the curriculum. The textbook is the most popular source of conveying knowledge by all language teachers in their classrooms. A good EFL curriculum should meet students’ needs, expose the students to language in authentic use and provide the students with opportunities to use the target lan¬guage to achieve communicative purposes. The only way to ensure the existence of these features is through careful evaluations of textbooks and other curriculum materials. According to Sheldon (1988), there are several reasons to evaluate textbooks . First, the evaluation helps teachers in making decisions on selecting the appropriate textbook. Additionally, evaluation of the merits and demerits of a textbook will familiarize teachers with its probable weaknesses and strengths. This enables teachers to make suitable adjustments to the material in their future instruction. Moreover, a textbook evaluation can be very useful in teacher development and professional growth.

This paper provides an inclusive look to the Third Grade Intermediate English textbook, Say It in English, which was implemented in 2005 by the Ministry of Education. In fact, from my experience in teaching English to the intermediate grades, I have noticed that many teachers have criticized this textbook. They believe that it is beyond the learner's level and overloaded with too many structure and vocabulary items.
This paper examines the extent to which the third grade intermediate curriculum is appropriate for the learners in terms of layout and design, objectives, topics, skills, activities, structure and vocabulary, language type and culture.

Layout and Design:

Teaching materia...

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...llocated time. Some writing and reading materials are beyond the students' level. The textbooks need to be accompanied with supplementary materials. In general, this kind of syllabus needs teachers to use communicative language teaching. As observed, most teachers follow the traditional approaches to teaching, which depend greatly on translation, writing, and reading rather than speaking. Thus, it is necessary for teachers to be trained on linguistic competence and modern methodology.
In conclusion, Cunningsworth (1984) assures that no textbook is completely suitable to a particular teaching situation. Language teachers should be responsible to compensate any defects of a textbook since no textbook is perfect. Most importantly, they should supply the textbook with self-created materials or materials from other sources that reflect the needs of the learners.

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