This study examines coursebooks used to teach English to undergraduate students majoring in English at a public university in Vietnam. The aim is to evaluate the extent to which the coursebooks prepare students for future use of English as an international language. This is in response to a call made by key scholars, including those in Vietnam,…

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) seeks mutually comprehensible social interaction in spoken discourse. To serve this purpose, coursebooks undoubtedly play a key role as to how speaking practice takes place. In Turkey, local coursebooks are prescribed by the Ministry of National Education (MoNE); however, many practitioners seem to opt for the…

Language functions are often used as fundamental guiding principles in ESL (English as a Second Language) textbooks especially now that focus on meaning has become crucial to ESL teaching and learning. This paper identifies general and specific language functions used in five beginner ESL textbooks to provide baseline data that will guide…

Adopting systemic functional linguistics (hereafter SFL) as the main theoretical framework, this study as part of a larger research project, aimed to examine how the language of textbooks deployed in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in the Vietnamese context shifted across levels in a book series. In order to do this, this research…

Undoubtedly, foreign language teaching intends to make students obtain the required competence so as to get the linguistic knowledge needed in a foreign language. With this respect, a textbook should supply to the users as much as possible, be satisfactory to fit into the syllabus, and meet all the needs and expectations of the students during the…

This report reviews four English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) textbooks, using criteria developed for volunteer-based organizations (VBOs). It illustrates the process that VBOs need to undertake prior to ESL textbook selection. The four texts include the following: "Laubach Way to English" (J. Macero and M. Lane), which focuses on linguistic rather…

Over the past decade, the importance of multiword lexical units has been receiving an extraordinary amount of attention, and is now almost a must-have component in the practice of English language teaching. The field of English for Business Purposes was among the first to recognize the uniqueness of multiword units, establishing the initial…

The purpose of this unit of work is to provide the teacher participant with some useful guidelines for evaluating and adapting written materials for specific English as a second language (ESL) classes. There is pre- and post-assessment of specific learning tasks relevant to evaluating and adapting materials as well as learning activities, which…

This article points out the difficulties teachers have in selecting suitable materials for teaching English for special purposes. Universal textbooks, designed to suit all possible situations, are not specific enough. The article proposes ways in which a broader spectrum of materials might be obtained: (1) by producing textbooks with optional…

A miniresearch project is reported on the attitudes toward minority groups and women in English textbooks used in Israel. The questionnaire and 12 criteria used offer a simple method by which teachers can examine and select materials they review for class use. (LB)

Discusses usefulness of various texts, offering a "functional catalog" listing texts in various groups, one showing relative difficulty, others being contrast pairs, as: generalized/specialized, intensive/extensive, historical/present. Criteria for choosing texts for teaching qualities are given. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

EFL teachers need to be careful in their decision on the selection of cultural content for ELT classrooms. To address the issue, this paper investigates the design guidelines to evaluate textbooks as sources of cultural content in the ELT curriculum. The paper is organized in two parts. In the first part, the notion of culture and the important…

This Invitation to Submit Materials provides an overview of the total instructional materials adoption-distribution process and specific instructions relating to initial submissions for materials to be used in California schools--kindergarten through grades 1 to 8--in the areas of art, music, bilingual and bicultural education, English as a Second…

The annotated bibliography provides information on commercially prepared materials that can be used in classrooms at all levels where English is taught as a second language. Twenty-four textbook series are described, arranged alphabetically by title. The listing is preceded by a categorization of the series by their content and focus:…

Discussion of the authenticity of materials contained in English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) textbooks for elementary/secondary school use focuses on content designed to accelerate academic language development and highlights the experiences of one teacher with one textbook. The approach taken is that integrating language and content, while taking…