Abstract:
The aim of this study was to evaluate the new version of Iranian EFL junior high school textbook (Prospect1) from the teachers’ perspectives. The participantsincluded90experienced English teachers (42 females and 48 males) randomly selected from different junior high schools in different districts of Gilan province,Iran. The evaluation of the textbook was conducted quantitatively through a 5-pointLikert scale with seven criteria including subject and content, activities, skills, physical layout, practical consideration, language and general criteria. However, itwas accompanied by some open-ended questions that solicited teachers' views about each criterion and the book in general. The descriptive statistics includingstandard deviation, mean, percentage and frequency were used in the data analysis.The findings revealed that teachers have positive perceptions toward thisbook.They had a positive view about the prospect1 because of its content and topic relevancy to learners' needs, including real life situations, enjoying challenging subject, having communicative pair and group works and attending to four skillsequally. However, they intensified some problems in their open ended questions such as insufficiency of teaching time that is 1.5 hour during a week, not focusingon explicit presentation of some words and grammatical points and not paying attention to some sub-skill strategies. These findings can be helpful for curriculumdesigners and textbook writers to design some valuable textbooks for other levelsand to consider correspondence between time of teaching and volume of the book.
Machine summary:
"Iranian New Junior High School Book (Prospect 1) Weighted against Material Evaluation Checklist from Teachers' Perspective Touran Ahour*1, Farhad Golpour2 1,2 Department of English, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Iran *corresponding author: ahour@iaut.
Some researchers evaluated textbooks taught at Iranian private institutions such as Azizipour and Baghelani (2014),Sahragard, Rahimi, and Zaremoayeddi (2008) and Shin(2012);some studies were done on those taught at junior and senior high school levels such asAnsary (2004), Jahangard(2007), Ghorbani (2011), Ahour, Towhidiyan and Saeidi(2014) And the last study done by Golpour (2012) on junior high school book series(Right Path to English).
So the main purpose of this study was the evaluation of prospect1 (new published book for junior high school book) based on Litz (2005) questionnaire to gather precise views of teachers about its different features.
Ahmadi (2002) examined high school text books and discovered some problems such as not attending to learners' needs, inadequate time of teaching, not available teachers' guide, artificial and not authentic conversational texts, no cultural points represented, dull reading texts and words not found in the succeeding lessons.
Golpour (2012), by evaluating the Right Path to English according to Tuker's(1992) questionnaire, discovered that these series(book 1,2 &3) suffer from problems including inappropriate physical layout, lack of recycled materials, no consideration of all skills, artificial recording, no attention to learners needs, shortage of a teacher manual and no involvement of communicative activities.
Conclusion In this study, the new junior high school English Text book, entitled "Prospect 1" was investigated from different aspects such practical consideration, layout and design, activities, skills, language type, content and subject and conclusion."