Analysis of Language Systems of Iranian EFL Coursebook

Textbooks or coursebooks are the books are designed and published definitely to help languagelearners to increase their linguistic and communicative abilities (Hutchinson, 1987). Thelinguistic abilities of the language learners are one of the important aspects of a coursebook andthe four systems of language are grammar, vocabulary, phonology, and discourse (Klimova,2014). Therefore, one of the main objective of a coursebook is presenting the language systemsas well as appropriate activities and tasks to aid the learners to acquire them perfectly to be ableto develop their linguistic competence (Brown, 2007). The purpose of this study was toinvestigate the position and approach about presenting language systems in Iranian EFLcoursebook which are labeled as Prospect in three volumes. In order to conduct this study, thethree volumes of the coursebook were coded to examine the effectiveness and appropriateness ofpresenting all four language systems. To triangulate the findings, the teachers’ perceptions wereobtained through a questionnaire and 3 expert teachers who are the head of the Englishdepartment in 3 different cities were interviewed. The findings show that the coursebook needs acomplete revision in all four language systems. The grammar part needs more exposure andactivates to develop the learners’ accuracy; the vocabulary part do not have any appropriateactivity and recycling is ignored; the phonology just is limited to intonation, one aspect of suprasegmental,and other aspects of phonology are disregarded; the discourse is limited to the localcontext and culture and there is no sign of target language discourse.

Keywords:

Language system , Coursebook , Linguistics competence