Textbooks

As a mediator between teacher and learner, studies have suggested the importance of the textbook; therefore, issues emerging from textbook design and selection have been investigated. Some studies primarily focus on the consequence of textbook design (Funk, 2012), others concentrate on the textbook evaluation process (Cheng et al., 2011). This study explores teachers’ and students’ perceptions on the issue of textbooks in English language education.

Textbooks play a vital role in language classrooms since they are essential elements of learning, given that they provide an explicit framework which helps teachers and students keep track of what they have already done and what they will be doing in the next lessons and also help teachers prepare materials for the class in a timely manner; therefore, teachers do not have to waste time creating other materials (Ur, 1998). Considering the importance of textbooks, it is of vital importance for selectors to choose the most appropriate teaching materials for their learners, as pointed out by Cheng et al., (2011) who indicate that textbook selection has an effect on the teacher, students, and classroom dynamic.

However, there are a number of studies that point out the problems of using textbooks, mostly involving textbook quality. Textbooks used in classrooms do not always meet students’ needs, since they are mostly written for a global market. Therefore, textbooks are likely to include some irrelevant and uninteresting topics for some groups of students that lead to students becoming bored in the classroom, as noted in Diniah, (2013), that textbooks do not meet teachers’ and students’ requirement, because of the lack of appropriate content. This is also supported by Kayapinar (2009), suggesting that it is highly beneficial to use a textbook which could meet learners’ needs or expectations. However, it is rather difficult for a textbook to meet all learners’ needs since each learner might be interested in different areas, as pointed out by Riassati and Zare, 2010, and no single textbook can meet a large and different groups of language learners; therefore, teachers take this into account and try to compensate for the weaknesses of each textbook to bring about the most effective outcome for their learners. Moreover, some textbooks selected for language classrooms are written by foreigners; hence, the topics related to the cultural setting and knowledge of the native countries might not be appropriate for students (Riassati and Zare, 2010; Srakang and Jansem, 2012); however, it does not always mean that providing cultural settings and knowledge of native English speaking countries is uninteresting. It can be beneficial to provide cultural knowledge in English language education as suggested by Thanasoulas (2001) and it seems that teaching foreign language could beneficially include cultural factors as foreign language intercultural competence is vital for the enrichment of communicative competence and can promote cultural insightfulness. Thus, the textbook selected should not be culturally biased so that learners can portray positive stereotypes (Tok, 2010).

Furthermore, the fact that most textbooks do not meet learners’ educational levels and proficiency levels is also regarded as a problem, despite the fact that textbooks are claimed to provide for each level and are properly organised to suit students’ levels of study (Chandran, 2003). Level of language input in the textbooks does not match learners’ language proficiency. Teachers still suggested that most textbooks contained little explanation and insufficient amount of knowledge including all skills; therefore, they needed to provide supplementary worksheets to add students’ extra knowledge (Ghorbani, 2011; Srakang and Jansem, 2012). Moreover, because the educational system in many countries such as Thailand and Turkey is exam-oriented, the primary aim of students for English learning is to pass university entrance examinations (Darasawang, 2007). Therefore, the knowledge provided in textbooks might be inadequate for students to prepare themselves to pass examinations, especially because there

are only a few examples of university examination-type questions in most Thai textbooks (Srakang and Jansem, 2012). It is thus necessary to re-evaluate textbooks in order to respond to students’ needs and provide more appropriate knowledge in language classes (Phonhan et al., 2012).

From all the issues mentioned above, textbook evaluation might be needed, as noted in Zhao and Zhang (2005), since this allows teachers and educational administrators to assess the strong and weak points of textbooks when they choose them for each level of students to meet their needs, to cover all language skills, to focus on the examination as well as to foster cultural awareness. This is because some textbooks do not cover all language skills or there is no balance among four language skills, as suggested in some studies (Farooqui, 2008; Ghorbani, 2011) which have found that some textbooks pay little attention to writing and speaking. Language teachers, therefore, have the responsibility to choose the appropriate textbook to meet their students’ needs, as teachers play a vital role as mediators between published textbooks and their students (Srakang and Jansem, 2012).

Interestingly, due to a number of difficulties of textbooks, some teachers in Srakang & Jansem (2012)’s study believed that using English textbooks was a waste of time. Instead, due to the exam-oriented system in Thailand, Thai EFL teachers in this study provided supplementary worksheets to meet learners’ need, including detailed grammar and language items, most of which were taken from examples of the entrance examination.