Introduction

The coursebook has become at almost universal element of ELT, which plays as
a vital and positive part in the learning and teaching process in English (Hutchinson &
torres, 1994).
The coursebook is vital to develop even more accurate and revealing ways of
evaluation and selecting coursebook is that materials themselves have involved into
more complex object. While in the early days ELT coursebooks contained mainly
reading text accompanied by a set of comprehension questions and few grammar and
vocabulary exercise, materials today frequently offer packages for language teaching
and learning which include workbooks, teachers guides, audio and video support and
even CALL programmers with precise indications of the work that teachers and
learners are to do together in a way that effectively structures classroom lesson.
The selection of materials involves matching the given materials against the
context in which they are going to be used and the needs and interest of the teachers
and leaners who work within it to find the best possible fit between them.

The Roles and Functions of Coursebooks

The coursebook plays essential roles because it might be helpful to begin by

examining current thinking regarding the roles and functions of Course books. This
should help bring clarity to the act of judging the worth of course books, particularly in
the face of the broad variation found among teacher of English across the world who
use them and the diversity in the objectives for learning English that exists among their
students.
The function of corsebooks provide teachers and learners with a range of
professionally developed materials within tried and tested syllabus structures, allowing
teachers to spend their valuable time more on facilitating learning than materials
production.

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 According to Bell, Gower, Edge and Wharton, they state the following
advantages for the use of coursebooks:
 Fulfill a wide range of practical needs. Particularly in context where English is
being taught in a non-English-Speaking environment and where teachers either
lack training or sufficient time to analyze each group’s needs.
 Helps provide a route map for both teachers and learners. Making it possible for
them to look ahead to what will be done in a lesson as well as to look back on what
has been done.
 Provide structure and predictability. Which help give participants in social
interaction like a lesson safe base, a platform for negotiation and exploration
 By dealing with a certain amount of routine work for teachers. The coursebook
frees them to attend to more important aspects of lesson planning (including
materials adaptation and supplementation) and to concentrate on using their
creative skill.
 Provide teachers particularly those lacking in training and experience with a sense
of self-confidence and security.
 Most of them are designed and develop by experts in the field. Conversant with
current theoretical approaches and methodological practices. The quality of
sophistication in their design, content and organization would be difficult to match
with home – grown materials.
 Can act as agents of change. Allowing innovative ideas to be introduced within
their structured framework in way that enable teachers and learners to develop in
harmony with these new ideas.

Materials Evaluation and Selection

Material evaluation is a procedure that involves measuring the value or potential

value of a set of learning materials. It also involves making judgments about the effect
of the materials on the people using them.
This notion is reflected in Murphy’s (1985: 10) complaint "the necessity for
evaluation is not understood and recognized". However, this tradition has changed due
to the strong interest of applied linguists like Rea-Dickens and Germaine (1992) and
Weir and Roberts (1994) regarding the goals, roles and methods of evaluation in

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language teaching. This development is partly due to applied linguists’ recent interest in
education theory and the need to conduct large-scale evaluations for external agencies
like the British Council and the United States agencies (USAID) that fund programs.
Evaluations can be macro or micro in scale and can be carried out for either
accountability or developmental purposes or both of these. In macro evaluation, various
administrative and curricular aspects are examined (e.g. materials evaluation, teacher
evaluation, learner evaluation), while micro evaluation focuses on the specific aspect of
the curriculum or the administration of the program such as evaluation of learning
tasks, questioning practices, learners’ participation etc. (Ellis, 1998).
The evaluation in language teaching has been primarily concerned with the
macro evaluation of programs and projects (Ellis, 1998), and most evaluation studies
have been conducted in order to measure the extent to which the objectives of a
program have been met, and to identify those aspects that can be improved. As Ellis
(1998) observes, this kind of analysis is obviously of interest to teachers as they learn
whether or not the goals have been accomplished and whether any changes should be
made to the program. However, most teachers are less likely to be concerned with the
evaluation of the program as a whole, and more concerned with the extent to which a
particular textbook, or a teaching activity is effective in their teaching context.
The evaluation of teaching materials may be done before they are used in the
classroom in order to determine whether they suit the needs of the particular group of
learners (predictive evaluation), or after the materials have been used in the classroom
in order to evaluate their effectiveness and efficiency, and teachers’ and learners’
attitudes towards them (retrospective evaluation). This paper will introduce a
systematic procedure for conducting the predictive evaluation of language teaching
tasks.
Another distinction that will be useful to make is that between the evaluation of
materials and their selection. Evaluation, like selection is a matter of judging the fitness
of something for a particular purpose. However, while it is true that the selection of
materials inevitably involves, or subsumes, a process of evaluation, evaluation can be
undertaken for a variety of purposes and carried out in a variety of ways. In the
selection materials, on the other hand, what assumes primary importance is the analysis
of learner needs and interests and how these are addressed.

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 Existing Proposals for Evaluating Materials

Many evaluation checklists have been design to help teachers make a systematic
selection of textbooks. These changes in the extent to which they reflect the priorities
and constraints that might characterize specific context of ELT teaching. Tomlinson has
referred in greater detail to previous approaches to evaluating materials.
The evaluation instruments and checklist are organized into two or more levels
or stages to reflect the decision process the teachers need to go through (Ellis, 1998:
220). For instance:
Breen and Candlin’s (1987) interactive, step-by-step guide to coursebook
evaluation considers two phases, one addressing the overall usefulness of the materials
and second aiming at a more searching analysis with a particular group of learners and
classroom situation in mind. Hutchison (1987) views evaluation as an interactive
process involving a subjective and objective analysis of materials and the extent to
which they match teacher and student needs in a given context. McDonough and Shaw
(1993) have proposed two complementary stages, beginning with an external evaluation
and moving on to an in-depth internal evaluation of two or more units in terms of
presentation of skills, grading and sequencing of tasks, kinds of texts used and the
relationship between exercises and tests. Sheldon’s very useful framework (1988)
covers a range of criteria from those relating to purely practical factors like availability
and physical characteristics such as layout and graphics to more psychological and
psycholinguistic aspects such as learner needs and learning objectives, their assumed
background, target age range, culture, conceptual and schematic development,
expectations and learning preferences.
Cunningsworth’s (1984) proposal was the most comprehensive for materials
evaluation, taking as it does the learner’s context and learning principles as its starting
point. The general guidlines identified and the criteria they inform are presented
alongside useful use studies, illustrated with clear examples from currrent published
materials relating to areas of grammar, phonology and discourse as well as the language
skills.

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 Finally, Tomlinson’s (1998) introduction to Materials Development in
Language Teaching provides an overview of many of opinions and basic principles of
second language acquisition that relevant to an understanding of what good materials.
The value of materials for Tomlinson lies in their effectiveness in encouraging learners
to make discoveries for themselves through self-investment, through intellectual,
aesthetic and emotional engagement with authentic input.
A principle problem with checklist and questionnaires that discussed above is
they frequently involve making general, impressionistic judgments about materials
rather than providing an in-depth and systematic investigation of what they contain.
Secondly, as Sheldon argues, the discursive format in which they are presented often
makes it difficult to separate description, guidance, and criticism (Sheldon, 1988: 241).
Then again, as coursebook criteria are emphatically local, no one is really certain what
criteria and constraints are actually operative in ELT contexts worldwide.
Sheldon says that it is clear that coursebook assessment is fundamentally a
subjective, rule of thumb activity and that no neat formula, grid or system will ever
provide a definitive yardstick (Sheldon, 1988: 245). The survey guides that have been
proposed, although of practical use to teachers, raise many questions relating to how the
materials should be considered and crucially how one aspect should be weighted in
relation to another.

A Framework for the Selection of Coursebooks

In evaluating Course books, aspects that we have to focus on is largely depend

on the purpose of that what we are looking at the materials. We can judge the materials
such as the papers and binding, pricing and etc. but the focus here is judge the content
quality of the materials with our needs, the pedagogical focus. There are two stages that
should be considered when we select materials. The first stage is assessing the content
of the book in relation to its professed aims. The second stage of analysis would
involve assessing the effectiveness of materials in terms of the specific needs and
context of the intended learners as well as how well they serve the teaching-learning
process.

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 The framework that proposed by Rubdy basically addresses this stage of
evaluation and consists of three broad categories, each assessing the potential validity
of the materials in relation to:
1. The learners’ needs, goals and pedagogical requirements;
2. The teacher’s skills, abilities, theories and beliefs; and
3. The thinking underlying the materials writer’s presentation of the content and
approach to teaching and learning respectively.

Psychological Validity

The need for student-centeredness in recent years has made it necessary to

conduct some sort of needs analysis, whether in the construction of a syllabus or a set
of materials. The key is the connection between the books with the students’ need, not
just their needs in the class but also in the real world and for the future use of their
knowledge or their long term goals. In terms of materials, this means that the
experience of working with the activities contained in them should provide students
with confidence in their ability to communicate despite difficulties.
Taking this aspect of student-centeredness a step further, one might wish to find
out to what extent the materials have the potential to foster self-directed, independent
learning. As Tomlinson (1998) notes, the most significant role of materials is to involve
students in decision-making about their own learning. One way of doing this is to
channel their energies towards making existing materials more relevant and motivating;
another would be to involve them in generating their own materials out of the reading
and listening texts provided, as well as other source materials, to suit their own level
and interest. Integral to the plan of a course book can be made this movement from
teacher-defined tasks to tasks identified by students themselves; and from there on to a
stage where student groups define areas of interest to work on and select materials from
different sources on their own to generate task outcomes.
As Edge and Wharton (1998:296) point out, if learner in classroom can initiate
interaction patterns and create the meanings they want to personally express, then there
is more chance that they will be able to make use of such learning to exploit outside
sources for learning when they find them. The following criteria mirror these issues:

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Rationale/Learner Needs, Independence and Autonomy, Self-development, Creativity,
and Cooperation.

Pedagogical Validity

In Indonesia, pedagogical is a type of competencies that absolutely need to be

mastered by teachers. Pedagogical competence is essentially the teacher's ability to
manage the learning process of students. Competence Pedagogic is distinctive
competencies, which will differentiate teachers to others and will determine the success
of learning outcomes of the learners. Pedagogical competence covers; knowing the
characteristics of students, mastering the learning theory and principles of learning,
ability to develop curriculum, the learning activities that educate, understand and
develop the potential of learners, communication with learners, assessment and
evaluation of learning (Kemendiknas, 2010).
Current trends in education, the learners have grown quickly in term of
linguistic development, teachers are themselves impelled continually to improve and
develop their skills and abilities and acquire new ones. This requires teachers not only
to reflect on their practice (Schon, 1983; Richard, 1993) but also calls for a certain
attitude of openness to new possibilities and a desire to continue to learn. A commercial
coursebook can play an important in teacher development if it offers the teacher
opportunity to learn more about the language and about approaches to teaching in a
way that allows them to integrate new ideas into their experiences of reflective practice
achieve a synthesis of a wide variety of teaching-related schemata (Edge and Wharton,
1998).
Materials should provide practical guidance on how to deal with particular texts
and activities, suggesting innovative methods and approaches and offering alternative
plans and procedures to enable teachers to maintain student motivation in class, or
generate productive interaction. Teacher should improve their self-development, they
cannot be developed by an outside agent and that this can best be brought about most
effectively through self-initiated effort, course materials can motivate teachers to
explore possibilities for self-actualization, restricted only if the teacher is reluctant to
grow professionally. As Edge and Wharton (1998:297) rightly observe, then, ‘a

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coursebook designed to encourage teacher development, if it is successful, will itself be
subject of evaluation adaption, and critical use’.
Teacher are expected to be capable of generating a supportive psychological
climate and sustain learner motivation and interest in class, the texts and topics
incorporated in the coursebook that can help teachers evoke learners interest and
investment. Experienced teachers are known not to follow the script of a coursebook
inflexibility: ‘They add, delete and change tasks at the planning stage, and they reshape
their plans during the lesson in response to the interactions that take place’ (Edge and
Wharton, 1998:300). So, the materials should facilitate the flexible use of the
coursebook and foster the teacher’s capacity for creativity and flexibility.

Process and Content Validity

Process and content here refers to the materials to represent the interaction that
takes place between teachers and students. It relates to the way in which are carried
over into the tasks and activities that the learners are required to perform and the nature
of these activities in terms of their clarity and coherence of presentation, their
sufficiency, accessibility, and appropriacy. The information gathered under this
category thus relates to the methodology, content, format, layout and design features of
the materials as well as the theoretical assumptions about language and language
learning that underpin them.
In content, materials should provide a rich, varied and comprehensible input.
The topics and texts are challenging and they can enrich the learners’’ personal
knowledge and experience and foster a positive personality. There will be varied
activities at different levels of task difficulty. Materials are well contextualized, call for
closed and open-ended responses, and grammatical explanations are adequate.

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 References

Bell, J. and Gower, R. (1998) ‘Writing course materials for the world: a great
compromise’, in B. Tomlinson (ed) Materials Development in Language
Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 116-29.

Breen, M. P. (1987) ‘Learner contributions to task design’, in C. N. Candlin and D.F.

Murphy (eds) Language Learning Tasks. London: Prentice Hall.

Breen, M. P. (1989) ‘The evaluation cycle for learning tasks’, in R. Johnson (ed.) The
Second Language Curriculum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp
187-206

Breen, M. P. and Candlin, C. N. (1987) ‘Which materials?: a costumer’s and designer’s

guide’, in L. E. Sheldon ELT Textbooks and Materials: Problems in Evaluation
and Development. ELT Documents 126. London: Modern English
Publications/The British Council, pp. 13-27.

Cunningsworth, A. (1984) Evaluating and Selecting ELT Materials. London:

Heinemann.

Edge, J. and Wharton, S. (1998) ‘Autonomy and development: living in the materials
world’, in B. Tomlinson, (ed.) Materials Development in Language Teaching.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 225-310.

Ellis, R (1998) ‘The evaluation of communicative tasks’, in B. Tomlinson (ed.)

Mateials Development in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 217-38.

Hutchinson, T. and Torres, E. (1994) ‘The textbooks as agent of change’. ELT Journal,
48 (4), 315-28.

Hutchinson, T. and Waters, A. (1987) English for Specific Purposes: A learning

Centered Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Kementerian Pendidikan Nasional. Direktorat Jenderal Peningkatan Mutu Pendidik dan
Tenaga Kependidikan. 2010. Pedoman Pelaksanaan Penilaian Kinerja Guru
(PK Guru). Jakarta.

McDonough, J. and Shaw, C. (1993) Materials and Methods in ELT. Oxford:

Blackwell.

Richard, J. C. (1993) ‘Beyond the textbook: the role of commercial materials in

language teaching’. RELC Journal, Singapore, 24 (1), 1-14.

Schon, D. (1983) The reflective Practitioner. London: Temple Smith.

Sheldon, L. E. (1988) ‘Evaluation of ELT textbooks and materials’. ELT Journal, 42

(4), 237-46.

Tomlinson, B. (ed.) (1998) Materials Development in Language Teaching. Cambridge:

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