Comparing Iranian school books vs Top notch

Skills/subskills: Reading and Vocabulary

1. Reading:

In Prospect we have two reading sections. One is given at the beginning of each lesson and is presented
as a Dialogue followed by some comprehension questions. And the other is at the end of the lesson and
is also followed by some questions. There are also pronunciation practice and examples in the beginning
of second reading of prospect.

In Top notch, similar to Prospect there is a reading at the beginning of each lesson, which is also in form
of a dialogue. however, Top notch comes with extra audio files that accompany the dialogue and is also
a listening and pronunciation practice. Furthermore, there is no second reading in Top notch lessons and
instead we have a few much longer readings implemented in each unit.

Readings in Top notch are rather extensive, they are longer and appear more authentic compared to
Prospect that seem to only be in favor of the grammer and vocabulary. Top notch readings have
questions before and after them. Students are asked to skim and scan the text, answer questions and
talk about the topic in groups or alone.

According to Christine Nuttall (1996), suitability should be a criteria for choosing a readings. Top notch
readings are about different topics and develop in interesting ways. This makes them enjoyable and
encourage students to read them. The graphics of these readings and their layout resembles real world
texts, for example one reading is an article from a newspaper and visually it looks like one as well, so
students can get a feeling of achievement, which is the second criteria of Nuttall, exploitability. And for
the third criteria, readability, we can say both could be enough readable, but Prospect is less
challenging.

2. Vocabulary:

Readings always introduce new words and idioms to the learners and according to the case study of
Pigada and Schmitt (2006) large amount of incidental vocabulary learning comes from extensive reading.
However, as mentioned earlier Prospect does not include any long readings in it. Also, since its readings
are not authentic, the new words may feel out of place and not fitting the context, thereby failing to
grab the learner’s attention.

Vocabulary practices in Prospect are presented at the end of each lesson and are usually a long list of
words with no context or graphics. Students have to go to the end of the lesson and read the new words
and then come back to the readings. Brown suggest that glossaries should appear in proximity of the
reading or where the words is first presented. These glosses are meant to help students with words that
are likely to be unknown.

On the other hand, Top notch Vocabulary practices are more graphical and much closer to the readings.
Unlike Prospect they are mostly presented as phrases and idioms, which can help with learning them
easier.