Iranian EFL Teachers’ Perspective on Four Corners Textbook Series

Textbooks play a very crucial role in the realm of language teaching and learning and are considered the next important factor in the second/foreign language classroom after the teacher (Riazi, 2003, p. 52). This paper was an attempt to evaluate an EFL textbook commonly taught in several Iranian private language institutes, namely, Four Corners textbook series (Richards & Bohlke, 2012), on the lookout for Iranian EFL teachers’ perspective on the efficiency of the textbook.Four Corners has four levels which takes students from the A1 level (true beginner) through to a strong B1 level (mid-intermediate).To this end, twenty four Iranian EFL teachers who had at least one year experience of teaching Four Corners rated the textbook series. Litz’s (2005) teacher textbook evaluation checklist was utilized to collect the required data and explore the textbook series meticulously in all crucial aspects. The results of descriptive statistics revealed that the teachers were satisfied with the Four Corners textbook series and believed that the textbook properly addresses the needs and wants of the Iranian EFL learners. However, the findings also indicated that the textbook suffers from a weakness. The results revealed that the Four Corners series does not adequately emphasize the listening skill. One suggestion to remedy the aforementioned problem is that the EFL teachers can ponder on other additional exercises and activities to solve the problem. The writers of the textbook, language institutes managers, material developers, EFL teachers and students can benefit from the results of the present study.

Keywords:

textbook evaluation , four corners series , EFL teachers