Assessing the Authenticity of Conversations in Iranian High School ELT Materials: Prospect Two in Focus

Textbook writers have always tried to develop motivating and lively English language teaching (ELT) content.They claim that,Prospect, the newly developed series by Iran s ministry of education,are based on the fundamental principles of the communicative language teaching (CLT) and, as such, enjoy a high level of authenticity in terms of content. As the main unit for presenting course content, Prospectconversations play a central role in promoting second language (L2) learning. Indeed, if a conversation is authentic, it will substantially contribute to learners enhanced motivation to take part in activities on a voluntary basis. This paper aims to evaluate the authenticity of seven conversations in Prospect Two, the English series currently used to teach Iranian junior high school students. The participants were 15 English teachers who had more than15 years of teaching experience at the ministry of education and 50 students in grade 9 who had already passed Prospect Two. Theparticipants were asked fill out the authenticity checklist based on Bachman and Palmer (1996). The results showed that from the view point of both the teachers’ and the students’, most of the conversations bear a degree of resemblance to real life activities. In other words, stakeholders were found to consider the content of these conversations authentic.

Keywords:

Material Evaluation , Conversation Analysis , Authenticity , Prospect Two