On the Authenticity of words in Iranian EFL Textbooks (Prospect Series)

Word selection plays an important role in developing a textbook and the most important criterion for the selection of vocabulary items has to be its usefulness for the learners' needs. So, this study intended to investigate the authenticity of words in Prospect Series, the newly developed junior high school English textbooks in Iran. It tried to find out to what extent the words used in this series are authentic, i e, useful and applicable, based on English dictionaries and teachers’ attitudes. For this purpose, this study began with extracting words used in Prospect series and comparing them to the ۱۰۰۰ most frequent words of English from Longman Dictionary. The researcher then compared these two sets of words to find out how consistent they are. The findings showed that less than ۵۰% of the around ۸۵۰ words included in the Prospect were among the ۱۰۰۰ most frequent wordlist of the Longman dictionary and as a result. To verify the results gained through this method, a checklist of thirty words from Prospect was prepared and ۳۰ teachers were asked to evaluate their usefulness. This also showed that teachers, in general, found the words to be somewhere between “relatively useful” and “useful”.

کلیدواژه ها:

Textbook analysis ، word selection ، Prospect series ، Longman basic words