Textbooks play an undeniable role in education and training. The selection of textbooks, which are crucial materials for both teachers and learners in the teaching-learning process, requires careful consideration of specific criteria. Textbooks wield an effect on intrinsic motivation factors like interest, desire, and curiosity. They also impact…

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…

The lack of cultural content, low interest level, and crowdedness of second language textbooks arise because every textbook represents a compromise: between the publisher's need to sell a book and the author's need to address specific pedagogical issues, and between the need to explain grammatical points fully and the need to explain them briefly.…

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…

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…

An analysis of a random sample of first- and second-year Spanish textbooks reveals that language textbooks fall short of achieving the affective goals learners and teachers value most, the aspect of culture that focuses on philosophical perspectives involving meaning, value, attitudes, and ideas. Moreover, most textbooks treat culture as products…

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)

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…