A Situated Evaluation of the Egyptian Primary School EFL Textbook “Time for English

Abstract

Textbooks play a very important role in many language classrooms, especially in the Egyptian EFL context. Therefore, the textbook used must surely be appropriate to its target users (i.e. learners, teachers, supervisors, etc.) and above all must be fit for the context in which it is used. The purpose of this study is to evaluate Time for English, the EFL textbook series used in Egyptian governmental primary schools from the perspectives of primary school EFL teachers in context. The study made use of the mixed-method research design. Data were collected from two sources. The first was Textbook Evaluation Checklist (TEC) which was an adapted form from Litz (2005). The adapted TEC addressed eight aspects of textbook evaluation. These are: physical make-up, layout and design, supplementary materials, activities and exercises, skills and sub-skills, language type, subject and content, and context. The TEC was administered to an opportunity sample of 216 primary school EFL teachers belonging to five governorates in Lower Egypt. The second was semi-structured interviews that were conducted with a subsample drawn from the TEC sample (n.=44). Findings of both quantitative and qualitative data analyses indicated that Time for English proved to have had a lot of pitfalls related to layout and design; supplementary materials; activities and exercises; skills and sub-skills; language type; subject and content; and context. Further results of qualitative data analysis indicated that a series of constraints acted against the feasibility of Time for English and suggestions to overcome these constraints were discussed. The results have clear implications for EFL curriculum and syllabus designers. The study findings provided a set of recommendations related to school EFL textbook selection and adaptation, and EFL teacher training. Finally, suggestions for further research are presented