چکیده:
To analyze and evaluate textbooks, researchers have either proposed scales and checklists to be filled by teachers and learners or conducted qualitative investigations of the match between SLA theories and textbook activities. This study, however, employs the microstructural approach of schema theory to scrutinize the reading passages of “Mosaic 1 Reading”. To this end, 17 passages of the textbook were randomly chosen and their constituting words were explored as semantic, syntactic, and parasyntactic schemata. The passages were also analyzed in terms of their readability indices. The results showed that they consist of 3722 schema types, 2979 (80%) of which are semantic in nature. Although the textbook aims at “academic success” at English language “proficiency levels”, it provides no objective definition of what they stand for. In terms of readability, however, the passages vary in difficulty from grade three in primary school to college level. Further, the textbook is discussed in terms of its constituting schemata and suitability to the Iranian context and suggestions are made for future research. The findings of this study have important implications for language teaching, testing and materials development. They show that language proficiency must be defined in terms of schema types and the bulk of class time must be spent on teaching semantic schemata rather than syntactic and parasyntactic ones. Similarly, for testing the reading comprehension of these passages, the number and type of test items must be based on the percentage of semantic and syntactic schema types and subjective criteria such as teachers‟ intuition or experience must be avoided both in teaching and testing the comprehension of passages.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Evaluation of "Mosaic 1 Reading": A Microstructural Approach to Textual Analysis of Pedagogical Materials Ebrahim Khodadady Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran Haniyeh Jajarmi Ph. D.
Keywords: schema theory, materials development, reading comprehension, proficiency level, semantic domain Corresponding author: Ebrahim Khodadady (ekhodadady@ferdowsi.
The present study has, therefore, been designed to evaluate "Mosaic 1 Reading" (Wegmann & Knezevic, 2002) as a western- compiled textbook which is employed by some teachers in Iranian tertiary education centers such as Ferdowsi University of Mashhad to offer reading courses to EFL students at undergraduate level.
g. , Carrell, 1987; Mandler, 1984; Rumelhart, 1980; Schank, 1982).
Consequently, in schema-based teaching (SBT) (Khodadady & Hesarzadeh, 2014), the English teacher must be highly proficient and qualified to be able to enrich the students' schemata in the language they teach.
While the MICAST scrutinizes the "texts" to provide materials developers and language teachers with clear and systematic procedures of codification to base their evaluation and teaching on, the advocates of MACAST employ questionnaires or checklists to be filled by teachers or students (e.
In contrast to the MACAST, the MICAST-based analysis of M1R reveals the language proficiency level of the textbook by specifying the exact number of schema types which constitute the semantic, syntactic and parasyntactic domains of its reading passages.