Evaluatıon of EFL Coursebooks Taught in Turkey Based on Teachers’ Vıews

Abstract

Developing the most functional instructional materials has always been among the interests of educational specialists and researchers. While the publishers are expected to provide the most up-to-date course books, the literature on language education presents a great number of studies about developing criteria for coursebook evaluation. Thus, this study aims at finding out teacher views on English Language Teaching Coursebooks used in Turkey, in view of the coursebook evaluation criteria provided in the language learning literature. This study is a descriptive survey study and the study is conducted in Düzce/Turkey during the 2013-2014 academic year to get teacher views on English coursebooks used in Turkish state schools. 118 English language teachers attended the survey to provide views on the language textbooks they use in their classes. The “English Language Teaching Textbook Checklist” (Mukundan & Nimehchisalem, 2012 was used as the instrument of the research to obtain data throughout the study. According to the checklist, the obtained data were classified into two main categories as “general attributes” and “teaching-leaning content” where totally 14 sub-dimensions and 38 items are included. Data analysis consisted of mean score distributions based on the categories in the scale. Therefore, data were analysed descriptively and teacher responses to the items of the scale were evaluated in terms of mean scores. Results of the study indicate findings in favor of the English language coursebooks used in Turkey in some categories while suggesting less favourable results in some categories as well.