Designing and Developing a ative Checklist to Evaluate ...

1 1 Designing and Developing a ative Checklist to Evaluate General English Course Books in Iran and Comparing It with Other Existing Checklists in the World Hafez Shatery Department of English, Sirjan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Sirjan, Iran Maryam Azargoon Department of Linguistics, Tarbiat Modarres University, Tehran, Iran Abstract textbook evaluation and design has turned into a very important area in English Language Teaching, ELT (Shatery, 2012). In this regard, a plethora of checklists each comprising a set of categories has been developed to Evaluate the appropriateness of textbooks for a particular teaching-learning situation.

2 However, none of these checklists has taken into account the cultural, social and even political particularity and peculiarity of the educational milieu in which teaching and learning occurs. As such, the present study intends to design and develop a nativized Checklist to Evaluate General English course books in Iran and compare it with other existing checklists in the world. The participants of the present study were 100 Pre- university as well as General English teachers in Islamic Azad University (IAU)- Region Seven.

3 Joshua Mikeley's Checklist , which has been specifically designed to Evaluate General English course books, was given to the teachers in questions and they were asked to rate different categories of the Checklist as perfectly applicable, fairly applicable, and non-applicable for the Iranian context. At the end, they were interviewed for their suggestions on inclusion of new categories in the Checklist . The findings of the survey revealed that the new Checklist was meaningfully different from Joshua Mikeley's one and a perfect fit for the cultural, social and even political particularity and peculiarity of the teaching learning in an Iranian context.

4 Key terms: Social and political factors, #ativized Checklist , General English course books 1. Introduction textbook evaluation and design has turned into a very important area in English Language Teaching. evaluation is basically is said to be matching students needs with possible existing solutions (Hutchinson & Waters, 1987). Low states that teachers must continually Evaluate textbooks in order to make sure that they are appropriate for the classroom in question.

5 Therefore, teachers as well as material designers have to make use of the area of textbook evaluation and design so that they can question and form their opinions about textbooks . Other benefits of textbook evaluation are identifying their weak and strong points, utilizing their strong 2 points and improving their weak points by either modifying or replacing them with other books (Cunningworth, 1995). Nearly all of the studies on the issue of efl/esl text book as well as material evaluation have been conducted using predetermined checklists developed by the researcher to Evaluate the suitability of a specific text book or material for a specific situation.

6 In spite of this, almost all other researchers have been, are, and will continue to apply these specific checklists to situations and contexts for which they have not originally developed rendering results which are neither valid nor reliable. While there are a plethora of checklists in the literature in order to Evaluate efl/esl textbooks, not all these checklists are equally applicable to all sorts of contexts and situations; As such, the present study is an attempt to design and develop a native Checklist in order to Evaluate the university-level General English course books in Iran.

7 Afterwards, the newly developed Checklist is compared and contrasted with the existing checklists in the world to see how similar they are to and different from each other. 2. Review of Related Literature Considering the position of English language teaching in Iran, educational policies are decided primarily by the central government. All of the decisions made by the central government are passed down through provincial organizations for implementation at lower levels which have less authority in decision-making.

8 All major educational policies concerning the school systems, the curriculum standards, the compilation of textbooks, the examination system and so on, are under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education ion (ME). The English language is one of the compulsory subjects in the Iranian curriculum. Before the Iranian Revolution, in order to make the situation ideal, English native speakers were being employed to teach English to the students. After the Revolution (1979) due to circumstances, the system has changed thoroughly.

9 In the Ministry of Education, an organization has been established to design the textbooks for schools. With respect to the textbooks, it needs to be explained that in Iran all the textbooks for the schools are produced by the Ministry of Education and no alternatives are available. These course books are taught in both private and public schools and all the teachers follow the same syllabus. A secondary school in Iran includes 4 years of studying and in each level there is one book for Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL).

10 English language teachers are supposed to cover one book during each educational year. As mentioned earlier, the main concern of this research is the 3 English course books which are used in 3 levels of the Iranian Secondary Schools. Every academic year is composed of two terms (each term includes nearly 12 weeks) and the English language is taught in both terms. In other words, every course book is divided into two equal portions and every section would be taught within a term.