Learners on the Move: A Mixed Methods Evaluation of Iranian EFL Textbooks

With the advent of new English textbooks, course book evaluation has become an indispensible ingredient in all English Language Teaching (ELT) contexts. Thus, the present study aimed to evaluate the Iranian junior high school newly published course books, the Prospect series and examine their weaknesses and strengths from students’ points of views. In so doing, Litz’s questionnaire was employed to collect views of 417 junior high school students. Also, nine students took part in follow -up interviews to enrich the obtained data from their survey. The results of the questionnaire showed that students believe that this series requires some modifications regarding the design and lay-out, authenticity in activities, diversity of registers and accents, variety of subjects and content, and culture presentation. In addition, the students asserted in the interviews that, there are some other problems within the textbooks in terms of the selected topics, accessibility and quality of the multimedia materials, organizational problems of the content, and setting of the learning goals. By and large, as the course books are overwhelmingly taught and relied on in Iran and taught to all Iranian junior high school students, suggested improvements by the students can facilitate developing English course books in the future in which learners’ views are more highlighted.

Keywords:

Prospect Series , Students’ Views , Teaching English , Textbook Evaluation