Choose a Proper EFL Textbook: Evaluation of “Skyline” Series

Abstract

For years, ‘textbook’ has been regarded as one of the main sources of teaching and learning in most EFL classrooms. Textbooks are useful from different perspectives in that they can not only help teachers, especially EFL teachers, to manage their course of teaching in a systematic way but also since they are always at hand, they can benefit learners as a good recourse even outside classrooms. Recently, the issue of textbook evaluation has grasped the attention of many educational administrations, syllabus designers, and teachers. Before selecting any textbook, they should be assessed in different dimensions so that it conforms to the requirements, needs, interests and also cultural characteristics of the intended group of learners. The purpose of this study was to examine the advantages and disadvantages of ‘skyline’ series (Brewster, Davies & Rodgers, 2004) being taught in some Iranian EFL contexts. To this end, a total of 75 Iranian EFL teachers were asked to analyze different practical, pedagogical and external aspects of the book based on a checklist developed by Litz(2000).The results of descriptive statistics revealed that there is a consensus among teachers that ‘skyline’ contains a lot of useful characteristics (e.g., attractive appearance, topic-based structural-functional syllabus, multi-skills syllabus, and real-life tasks and activities) which address the needs of Iranian EFL learners in a communicative curriculum. However, there are some few gaps that should be regarded and filled with other appropriate supplementary materials or teachers’ explanations.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.