A Content Evaluation of the Vision 1 Textbook Based on Tomlinson’s (2003) Model

Textbooks play a fundamental role in English as a foreign language because through textbooks learners get familiar with target culture, social norms and values. Just as textbooks are important, the evaluation of textbooks is important as well. The evaluation of textbook material can provide helpful information for both teachers and material developers. However, very few studies have done an evaluation of the Vision 1 textbooks, especially based on the Tomlinson Model. Hence, the present study made an attempt to evaluate the efficiency of newly developed English textbooks, Vision 1. The main question of the study was how do Iranian EFL teachers evaluate the Vision 1 English textbook based on Tomlinson’s model In order to find out to how extent the Textbook Vision 1 is useful and authentic, 30 teachers were asked to fill out a checklist containing 21 questions. The participants were consisted of both male and female teachers from different schools and language institutes in Sari. The instruments applied in this study will be one standard questionnaire designed by Tomlinson (2003). The questionnaire is translated into Persian and its reliability was found to be .83. The material used in this study was the English Language Textbook Vision 1 which is being taught in Iran’s educational system to high school students. The results of the analysis showedthat the teachers had almost a positive evaluation of Vision 1 based on the final average score which was 3.07. 61.04% of the responses showed positive evaluation on the part of the teachers. The results had implications for teachers, learners, and material developers.

Keywords:

content analysis , evaluation , material development , textbook Vision 1