Eliciting Learners’ vs. Instructors’ Perspectives toward Vision Series: A Mixed-Methods Inquiry

Textbooks play a pivotal role in teaching and learning processes. Indeed, they influence the whole language learning and teaching processes. Regarding the significance of this issue, this exploration was set out to shed some illuminating light on senior high school students versus state sector in-service English teachers’ viewpoints toward recently-developed English textbooks (i.e., Vision series) which are published based on Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) principles. To this end, ۳۰۰ female students from three grades of various senior high schools and ۵۰ female state sector in-service English teachers from different senior high schools in Salmas, Iran participated in this mixed-methods study. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires with ۲۷ close-ended items consisting of five different sections. The outcomes of descriptive statistics and independent-samples t-tests demonstrated that both instructors and students believed that high school English textbooks were highly ineffective in enhancing students’ motivation to learn English, boosting the students’ accuracy in generating pragmatically correct utterances, developing the students’ fluency in speaking English, ameliorating the students’ language skills, and teaching communicative language as well as intercultural competence. Moreover, the results obtained from the interview protocols revealed that these textbooks failed to take the needs of the students into account. The present investigation recommends constructive changes in textbooks to make them more communicative and more consistent with the learners’ needs and expectations. This study, therefore, might be beneficial to textbook designers and material developers while designing new editions of the textbooks.

کلیدواژه ها:

CLT ، perspective ، senior high school students ، state sector in-service English teachers ، textbook evaluation ، vision series