The Importance Of Textbooks

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Textbooks have a major influence on students' learning and the nature and type of learning activities used in the classroom. Many English teachers rely heavily on textbooks for teaching and giving assignments. According to Educational Product Information Exchange (EPIE) (1976, cited in Rawadieh, 1998), nearly two thirds of classroom time is spent using written materials, particularly textbooks. Apple (1986) estimated that elementary and secondary students spend at least 75 percent of their time in classrooms using textbooks. As Mcdonough and Shaw (2003) state, the ability to evaluate textbooks effectively is a very important professional activity for all EFL teachers. This is partly because there are very few teachers who do not use published…show more content…
In this case the evaluation of current materials is of great importance as an inappropriate choice may waste funds and time and it will impose a demotivating effect on students and possibly other colleagues. The second scenario concerns teachers working with materials given to them by a ministry or similar body. Even though such teachers will not have to evaluate to adopt materials, they may well be interested in evaluation as a useful process in its own right, which will give them insights into the organizational principles of the materials and will help them to keep up with developments in the field. Nevertheless as Dickins (1994) notes, “The materials evaluation literature has tended to concentrate more or less exclusively on the analysis of the product (level of workplan).” This means that teachers carry out the evaluation of textbooks themselves in order to determine which materials best suit their purposes. McDonough and Shaw (2003) in their model for materials evaluation, for instance, distinguish between internal and external 250 The Journal of Asia TEFL evaluation, but both aspects refer to evaluation at the level of workplan and the extent to which a reviewer thinks that a book will do what it claims to…show more content…
They suggest that teacher characteristics, such as personality, psychological characteristics, teaching styles, and preference, are especially important with relation to materials. These characteristics should therefore be taken into account in evaluating teaching materials. Therefore, there seems to be no one fixed procedure for conducting textbook evaluation studies. What is important, however, is, as Cunningsworth (1996) notes, “to limit the number of criteria used, the number of questions asked, to manageable proportions. Otherwise we risk being swamped in a sea of detail”. Tomlinson (1999) also suggests that “the obvious but important point is that there can be no one model framework for the evaluation of materials; the framework used must be determined by the reasons, objectives and circumstances of the evaluation”. Most of the studies on textbook evaluation have focused on analyzing the content of textbooks (dialogues, reading texts and activities) to see how much they represent special knowledge such as language functions, speech acts, etc. However, few studies have attempted to investigate the learning objectives underpinning textbooks. The present study, as such, explores different
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