Global Business Textbooks Evaluation: A Task Type Perspective

Although textbooks are essential components of ESP/ELT classrooms, their sovereignty on teaching and the belief that teachers can blindly rely on them has been questioned. Textbook evaluation has become a necessary practice in the field of teaching. The present study attempted to evaluate two most popular global business English textbook series (Business Result and Market Leader) taught in Iranian institutes in terms of their task types according to Nunan s (1999) classification of the tasks. In his classification, tasks are divided into five major groups, and 20 different minor task types were classified under the main type of cognitive, interpersonal, linguistic, affective, and creative. Toachieve the purpose of the study, all tasks from each textbook were extracted and categorized under their macro and micro related groups and rechecked with two experts. The results revealed that the linguistic tasks were the most frequent and creative tasks were the least common tasks presented in these textbooks. More importantly, the results reported a significant difference among the frequency of task types in these textbooks. It was evident that all of these ESP textbooks covered all macro tasks and most of the micro tasks specified by Nunan (1999); however, some of them significantly focused on specific types of tasks. The findings of the present study could help teachers become more aware of different task types used in the materials. It could also provide insight for material developers to better select the most appropriate tasks and a balanced number of them considering the purpose of their program.

Keywords:

textbook evaluation , Nunan s (1999) classification of tasks , business English , task , task types