The Attitude of Iranian High School English Teachers Regarding Prospect Book Series:A Gender-Based Comparison

Prospect Series, as English coursebooks which embrace CLT approach used for the 6th and 7th grades in Iranian schools, have raised some controversial positive and negative feedback among English teachers and researchers during recent years. The difference between the attitudes of male and female teachers toward this coursebook was investigated in the present research. To this end, 70 teachers (33 males and 37 females) in the age range of 30 to 50 with at least a BA degree in English teaching with the minimum of 6 years of experience in this field were selected. The research design used for this study was ex-post facto. A questionnaire was given to the participants to elicit their explicit viewpoints about the coursebook. An online version of the questionnaire was prepared and sent to some forum administrators and also to teachers whose emails could be found on websites and forums. Their answers (the final data) were categorized in two groups based on their gender: males and females. Then, Mann-Whitney-U value was calculated to determine if the difference in the means of the two groups was statistically significant. Quantitative information was obtained using a questionnaire, too. The questionnaire contained Likert scales, ranging from poor to very good. The results of this study showed that there is a statistically significant difference at the level of .05 between the two groups in terms of their attitudes toward Prospect Series. The male teachers showed more positive attitudes in comparison to female teachers. This study can be replicated for other main coursebooks which are used extensively as language learning coursebooks in Iran. The findings of the present study have implications for English course book designers, material developers, syllabus designers, language teachers, and language learners.

کلیدواژه ها:

Prospect book series ، Iranian EFL teachers ، Attitudes ، Gender