Evaluation of English Textbooks in the Classroom

By Raquel Pastrana.

The evaluation of didactic materials is an important step in the classroom.

When evaluating instructional materials consider the degree to which each is

interesting, approachable, and engaging. This isn’t about materials being

“entertaining.” It’s about whether it can trigger curiosity and encourage deeper

thinking about the content. The more engaged students are with the materials,

the more they will learn. According to Campbell (1999), “Regardless of the care

used in their preparation, all types of instructional materials must be evaluated

prior to general use. Presents a comprehensive quality control procedure for

confirming effectiveness and value.”.

The textbook is a tool in the hands of the teacher, and the teacher must

know how to use it, and how useful it can be for everyone. The wealth of published

materials for English language teaching available in the market makes selecting

the right course book a challenging task. Textbooks are a key component in most

language programs. In some situations, they serve as the basis for much of the

language input learners receive and the language practice that occurs in the

classroom.

Books are a highly portable form of information and can be accessed

when, where, and at whatever rate and level of detail the reader desires.

Research indicates that, for many people, visual processing (i.e., reading) is

faster than auditory processing (i.e., listening to lectures), making textbooks a

very effective resource.

 The function of a textbook is essentially to guide the teaching and learning

of the curriculum in a particular subject. Against the backdrop of poor teacher

context knowledge, textbooks play a fundamental role in supplementing teachers’

knowledge deficits. They may provide the basis for the content of the lessons,

the balance of skills taught and the kinds of language practice the students take

part in.

Textbooks also contain a number of pedagogical aids, which are features

or attributes of the book that help a learner understand the content being

presented. There are several common pedagogical aids in textbooks, including:

• Chapter objectives

• Chapter summaries or reviews

• Checklists

• Headings and subheadings

• Tables of contents

• Tables of figures

• Indexes

• Focus questions and practice questions

• Case studies, vignettes, and examples of best practices

• Glossary and key terms

• Illustrations, including photos, charts, diagrams, and figures

• Multimedia

• Pronunciation guides

Weiten, Guadagno & Beck (1996) surveyed 134 students asking them how

familiar they were with the different pedagogical aids in their textbooks. In terms

of helpfulness, students rated boldfaced (92%) and italicized (81%) terms as the
most useful pedagogical aids, followed by practice test questions (77%) and

chapter summaries and reviews (73%) as being moderately to extremely helpful.

Using textbooks has some benefits. The one benefit of using textbooks is

that they provide information. The teacher is a reliable source of information, but

textbooks can be used to provide more. This is because teachers do not always

mention everything, maybe due to the limitation in duration of the lessons.

Textbooks will also help students in noting and highlighting the key points. They

can also add guides for easy understanding of sentences. If they note the key

words, it makes it easier to remember even during examinations.

Textbooks are also used for future reference. Students will always forget

what they have been taught by the teacher. They therefore need such books to

keep referring to, in order to refresh their memory. They may come with

instruction and guide the student on the kind of question that they are likely to

encounter during examinations.

These books will also enable instructors and teachers to get more

organized in their class lessons. Since these books are divided in chapters,

teachers find them reliable by following them as they are in teaching. This will

help when there is need to give tests to students. The teacher will also know on

the topics that students find difficulty in understanding and the ones they have

already understood.

Choosing a textbook is one of the most important selections which

teachers can make. Teachers cannot influence their working lives in many ways.

You cannot choose your teaching hours, your holiday periods, the classes you

teach, the learners who are in those classes, or the classrooms you use, but you
can choose your textbook. You select a text for your learners and for yourself, so

you first need to analyze your learners’ needs and your own needs.

Teachers want different things from their textbooks, and they use them in

different ways. Some teachers want a textbook to provide everything. They want

the teacher’s book to tell us what to do, in which sequence to do each activity and

how to assess the progress which our learners have made. However, some

teachers do not want the textbook to control their lives. They want to be able to

plan their own lessons or even their own syllabus. They want the textbook to be

a library of materials from which they can choose to be used in the ways they

choose.

When teachers have the freedom to choose course materials, they need

to take a structured approach to textbook evaluation and base their decision on

certain criteria that will help them judge whether the textbook will be suitable for

a particular group of learners.

There are many reasons to evaluate a book. A thorough evaluation would

enable the administrative and teaching staff of a specific institution or

organization to discriminate between all of the available textbooks on the market.

Textbook evaluation would provide a sense of familiarity with a book's content

thus assisting educators in identifying the particular strengths and weaknesses in

textbooks already in use. This would go a long way in ultimately assisting

teachers with making optimum use of a book's strong points and recognizing the

shortcomings of certain exercises, tasks, and entire texts.

One additional reason for textbook evaluation is the fact that it can be very

useful in teacher development and professional growth. Textbook evaluation

helps teachers move beyond impressionistic assessments and it helps them to

acquire useful, accurate, systematic, and contextual insights into the overall

nature of textbook material.

You evaluate textbooks to see how closely they match with your course

aims and objectives. I text might be showy, but if it doesn’t match with what your

course is trying to teach, it isn’t worth a penny. When you’re evaluating textbooks,

you should have a complete course description in front of you. The text and the

course description should match up pretty closely. The exact content doesn’t

matter as much as how well the text addresses the course objectives.

When evaluating a textbook, we need to know how it meets learners’

needs. Evaluation might vary from one context to another based on the aims,

wants, and abilities of the evaluators. Assessment of textbooks is a profitable way

of teacher development and gives beneficial perception to the teachers. It is

essential that the books chosen are instructional materials with a teaching

purpose, written using language simple and easy to understand, with an

appropriate reading level according to the characteristics of the learners.

Layout and illustrations are important predictors of a text's effectiveness.

One of the most effective types of illustration, especially for students with low

verbal aptitude, is a simple multicolor line drawing. Although more visually

appealing, and more prevalent in the current textbook market, realistic drawings

or photographs are less effective at enhancing student learning. The organization

of information on a page also affects student learning.

You’ll also want to identify things in the material that need your explanation

or commentary and provide that scaffolding to your students. It is also necessary

to consider the author and expertise in the subject area, date of publication,

reliability of information relevance, updates, and recent editions.

 Other factors that need to be considered are learners’ gender, nationalities

and educational backgrounds. Apart from learners, teachers need to think about

themselves as well, and various aspects of a learning teaching situation, such as

the methodological approach they tend to prefer, the level of personal initiative

they bring to their teaching, their freedom to diverge from the syllabus and

whether they have the right to adapt or supplement the standard textbook

According to Jack C. Richards, the analysis should involve identifying

these kinds of information in the qualities of a good textbook:

• Aims and objectives of the book.

• Level of the book.

• Skills addressed.

• Topics covered.

• Situations it is intended for.

• Target learners.

• Time required.

• Components.

• Number and length of units.

• Organization of units.

There are different possible approaches to using the textbooks, these could

be, to omit, basically, what it means is that we leave out selected parts of the

material presented in the book, either a single part of a lesson or indeed a whole

lesson or maybe even two or three lessons in a row.

Second, to replace, we can replace material within the book with what we

think is more suitable material. Third, to supplement, we can supplement

additional material into what's already given in the book so in areas where we
think our students need more help, we can add additional material as appropriate.

And fourth, to adapt. sometimes we would perhaps like to use our own style of

materials based on the information that's given in the textbook, rather than the

textbook materials themselves.

Textbooks have several major limitations. Although a well-written book can

engage and hold student interest, it is not inherently interactive. However, if

students are encouraged to ask questions while they read, seek answers within

the text, and identify other sources to explore ideas not contained in the text, they

will become active readers and gain the maximum benefit from their textbook.

When appropriate, it is important to help students to understand that a

textbook is not always the final authority on a topic, particularly in fields where

new information is discovered at a very fast rate. Students may learn that it is

okay to question the text if the teacher also openly disagrees with some

interpretations or approaches in the book.

REFERENCES

Wayne Weiten, Rosanna E. Guadagno, and Cynthia A. Beck, “Students

Perceptions of Textbook Pedagogical Aids,” Teaching of
Psychology 23, no. 2 (1996): 105–7.
https://doi.org/10.1207/s15328023top2302_8.

Campbell, C.P. (1999), "Instructional materials: their preparation and

evaluation", Journal of European Industrial Training, Vol. 23 No. 2,
pp. 57-107. https://doi.org/10.1108/03090599910257515