AN EXPLORATION OF HIGH SCHOOL TEACHERS EVALUATION OF NINTH GRADE ENGLISH TEXTBOOK PROSPECT 3

Textbook evaluation has recently become one of the challenging debates in the area of materials development in Iran. The aim of this study was to investigate the appropriateness of the English textbook Prospect 3 prepared by Iran Ministry of Education for Iranian ninth grade high school students from teachers’ viewpoints. Two hundred English language teachers (146 females and 54 males) participated in the study which was carried out quantitatively through a checklist adopted from Tomilson, et al. (2002) and Al-Hajailan (2003). The checklist was a five point likert-type scale consisting 34 statements about the features of the textbook under seven criteria, namely, physical appearance, content, objectives, language skills, language elements, activities and supplementary materials. The gathered data was then analyzed by SPSS software. In general, the results revealed the textbook was not satisfactory as expected. The findings of this study can be beneficial for teachers, textbook writers, materials developers, and also syllabus designers to compensate for the existing weak points by doing some revision.