CLT in Prospect Series: A Predictive Evaluation of Iranian Junior High School English Textbooks

Abstract

Textbooks have a chief standing as an essential element of language teaching; therefore, analyzing and evaluating them is imperative to guarantee their efficiency and consistency with the objectives set and expected in language classes. Hence, this study utilizing a Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) model, examined Cognitive, Communicative, and Creature potentials of three Iranian recently published junior high school English textbooks, called Prospect Series. The results showed that the intended books aiming at following the CLT approach failed to satisfy communicative, cognitive, and creative potentials sufficiently and some crucial ingredients of CLT, such as strategy instruction, use of authentic materials, and skills integration. Additionally, the over-emphasis on Iranian culture caused sociocultural aspects of CLT to be relatively neglected in this series, and foreign cultures are roughly avoided. Although the development of the Prospects is surely a step forward toward designing high-quality Iranian English textbooks in Iranian schools, progressive modifications on textbooks are always needed to reach their greatest formats. The findings of this study have useful implications for the Iranian stakeholders in the field of teaching English as a foreign language and the authors of the Prospect series in terms of revising and modifying activities to achieve the highest congruency with CLT tenants.

Keywords

• cognitive potential
• communicative potential
• content analysis
• coursebook evaluation
• creature potential
• prospect series