Exploring Iranian Students’ vs. Teachers’ Attitudes toward Senior High School English Textbooks: Vision Series in the Spotlight

This study was an attempt to evaluate senior high school learners’ versus state sector in-service English instructors’ perceptions toward Vision series which are locally-published based on Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) principles. To this end, ۳۰۰ female learners from three grades of senior high schools and ۵۰ female state sector in-service English instructors from various senior high schools in Salmas, Iran participated in this survey-based study. Data collection tools encompassed questionnaires with ۴۳ close-ended items consisting of nine different sections. The results of descriptive statistics revealed that both teachers and learners believed that high school English textbooks were highly ineffective in terms of actual activities, language functions section, pronunciation practice, physical make-up, reading texts, speaking and writing sections and they are effective only in terms of vocabulary section, and grammatical points. Indeed, the outcomes demonstrated that these textbooks failed to take the students’ needs into account. Thus, some revisions and modifications are recommended to be carried out to their content to make them more communicative and more consistent with the students’ needs and expectations.

Keywords:

CLT , Perception , Syllabus Design , Textbook Evaluation , Vision Series