The Correspondence of Prospect 1 to the Principle of Communicative Language Teaching: Language Teacher s Perspective

According to Tomlinson (2008), a textbook may lead to learners’ failure or success in acquiring the language or in some worst cases it may contain serious pedagogical flaws and other shortcomings. The current study was an attempt to explore whether there was any difference between those teachers who participated in prospect related in-service classes and those who have not in terms of their perceptions of communicative aspects of Prospect 1 textbook. In addition, it sought to investigate the perceptions of junior high school EFL teachers toward the content of the newly developed textbook Prospect 1 as far as the principles of CLT are concerned. In such doing, 61 male and female junior high school English teachers in Amol, Iran participated in this study. The material selected for evaluation was the Prospect 1. A 5-point Likert scale teacher textbook evaluation form developed by Litz (2002) ranging from ‘highly agree’ to ‘highly disagree’ was applied. Furthermore, in order to grasp influential comments on the part of the teachers, an open-ended checklist adopted from MacDonough and Shaw (2013) was distributed. This checklist was based on six main CLTimplications put forwarded by MacDonough and Shaw. Overall data analysis revealed that that the most favorable criteria for evaluating Prospect 1 included Practical Consideration, Conclusion, Activities, Subject and Content, Language Type, and Skills. In addition, regarding the teachers’ perceptions based on CLT principles, the role of grammar, communicative functions as properties of language, communicative behavior, and activities in the Prospect 1 were among the most favorable criteria for the EFL teachers.

Keywords:

Prospect 1 , Material Evaluation , Iranian in-service Teachers