Textbook Evaluation: Iranian EFL Teachers' and Students' Perception on New Junior High School Textbooks (Prospect Series)

Due to the importance of textbook evaluation, the present study was an attempt to find out the perceptions of both English teachers and EFL students toward the newly published textbooks of Iranian junior high schools namely Prospect ۱, ۲, and ۳ (Prospect Series) toward their different sections of the textbooks such as vocabulary and syntax, overall content, design and layout, content of each lesson, exercises and tasks and supplementary materials; and explored that there are significant differences between these perceptions or not. Also to achieve these purposes, ۶۰ EFL teachers and ۱۵۰ students from junior high schools in Rasht, Iran participated in this research. They were selected based on convenience sampling that is a non-probability sampling technique. A textbook evaluation questionnaire and interview were used as the instruments of the study. The results indicated that in terms of teachers' beliefs towards the textbooks namely Prospect Series, teachers had strong negative attitudes toward textbooks and their different parts such as vocabularies and syntax, design, overall content and skills; while, students had weak negative attitudes to the tasks and the supplementary materials at the textbooks. As a matter of fact, teachers expressed negative attitudes towards different sections of the textbooks. Furthermore, the finding showed that even though EFL students had neutral attitudes towards different sections of the textbooks under study, actually after reporting Chi-square test, the findings revealed that there was no significant difference between Iranian EFL teachers' and students' perception on new junior high school textbooks. The study has some implications for teachers and learners and could help material developers in the process of editing and improving the textbooks.

کلیدواژه ها:

Textbook Evaluation ، EFL Teachers ، EFL Students ، Perception ، Prospect Series