Iranian University Learners’ and Teachers’ Views on Adopted and Locally-Developed English Language Teaching Textbooks

Abstract

Teachers need evidence-based data to select, adapt, adopt, and effectively use textbooks.The present survey compared Iranian university English-as-a-Foreignlanguage (EFL) teachers' and learners' views on locally-produced textbooks and adopted ones.119 undergraduate university EFL learners and 36 EFL university teachers were selected through stratified random sampling from several Iranian universities.The participants completed an 81-item general-purpose textbook evaluation checklist developed for the purpose of the current study, once for local and once for international EFL textbooks.The survey revealed that all the mean ratings for adopted textbooks on all evaluation sub-sections were higher than those for locally-developed textbooks.The results also indicated that, for both teachers and learners, locally-developed and adopted (international) textbooks received the highest ratings on content, grammar, appearance, and learning activities while they received the lowest ratings on language skills (reading, writing, speaking, and listening).Mann-Whitney U test results showed that teachers rated locallydeveloped EFL textbooks significantly lower than their students only when they evaluated these types of textbooks as a whole.Teachers also rated adopted textbooks statistically significantly higher than learners in most evaluation subsections.Implications for EFL instruction at the tertiary level are discussed.

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