Textbook Series and English O-NET: Alignments of Prepared Knowledge and Secondary School Final Year Assessment

Abstract

The preparation for English language teaching materials in Thai secondary schools rely primarily on the use of western-published textbooks. Reasons are given by teachers that the books have assured the accuracy of the language (Ulla, 2019), and they provide proper models of language use (Tomlinson, 2008; Ulla, 2019). By using these textbooks, one of the ultimate goals for every school is to prepare students for the Ordinary National Educational Test (O-NET) in the final year of their secondary education (Grade 12). It is therefore interesting to examine whether or not the textbook series equip students with the knowledge and skills of language which align with the secondary school final year assessment. The preliminary investigation of this study (Sritrakarn, 2021) found that the English O-NET test items designed during the years 2016-2019 were partially aligned with the learning domains of the basic education core curriculum. This present study examined further the alignments of the O-NET tests and the school’s equipped knowledge through textbook series. Taking the lens of Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) genre-based approach, the texts and discourses used in the textbook series of one school were compared with those found in the O-NET test items. This paper discusses the findings and the implications of how to prepare the sources of input knowledge for the national assessment.