An Evaluation of the Iranian Junior High School English Textbooks

Abstract

With the advent of communicative language teaching, textbook evaluation has received a considerable attention over the last two decades. However, only a few studies have been conducted on the evaluation of newly- developed textbooks for junior high schools in Iran; therefore, this paper aimed to evaluate the Iranian junior high school new textbook Prospect and its old version Right Path to English1 (RPE1) in order to find out to what extent these textbooks are based on communicative purposes based on teachers' perceptions. To do so, One hundred male and female English junior high school teachers ranging from 2 to 30 years of teaching experience took part in this study. The textbooks were analyzed based on Razmjoo (2010) questionnaire including 41-items which includes six criteria, namely language components, task, activities, exercises, language skills, teacher's manual, general consideration and critical discourse analysis features. The findings of the research revealed that Prospect1 followed the communicative language teaching approach and fulfills students' needs. Conversely, the old version did not follow communicative language teaching approach because speaking and listening skills are neglected. In the light of the results gained, some practical implications are presented might be of use to the teachers, syllabus designers and materials developers.