Evaluation of Newly Developed EAP Textbooks for the Students of Medicine Published by SAMT

Abstract

EAP textbooks have been one of the most important materials commonly used in any EAP program and attracted many researchers' attention due to their crucial contributions to foreign/second language acquisition. Despite the plethora of research on EAP textbooks, especially EAP textbooks published by SAMT, the Organization for Researching and Composing University Textbooks in the Humanities, there seems to be a paucity of research on newly developed SAMT EAP textbooks. At the same time, although EAP textbooks are based on criteria to meet particular students’ needs in specific disciplines, there have been only a few evaluative studies on EAP textbooks taking students’ and teachers’ viewpoints into account. Therefore, the present study attempted to evaluate a newly developed SAMT EAP textbook for the students of Medicine, as a sample from SAMT publications, from the students' and teachers' perspectives. The study used a questionnaire and the results revealed that students and teachers were satisfied with the theoretical considerations, the organizational features and practical considerations, the vocabulary, and the grammatical structure of the current textbook. However, the students were not satisfied with the content and the language skills and the teachers were not satisfied with the content of the textbook. In addition, no significant difference between the students' and teachers' viewpoints with regard to the necessity condition of EAP textbooks was found. But, their responses to the questions related to the present condition of the current textbook were significantly different. Such findings can have some implications for EAP teachers, material developers, and textbook designers.