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Establishing criteria, gathering teacher and student feedback, analyzing content, and making value judgments are key stages in the coursebook evaluation process. Factors influencing coursebook selection include educational system, syllabus constraints, learner expectations, and teacher experience. Evaluations can occur before, during, and after using coursebooks, helping identify strengths and weaknesses for future improvements.
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CHAPTER TWO: ANALYSING AND EVALUATING COURSEBOOKS: A RATIONALE AND SOME GUIDELINES
Selecting coursebooks
The First stage: Establishing a set of general criteria beforehand to guide the process can be useful as this will set out clearly and explicitly what some of the agreed values are.
The Second stage: seek the opinions of practising teachers both within and outside your own institution. This is particularly valuable when others have already had some experience of using the materials in question.
The Third stage: Students' views on the usefulness of coursebooks are also worth canvassing. Some students can go further than this and give very cogent reasons for their preferences. The same procedure is also invaluable in supplementing information and opinions that have been obtained from others.
The Fourth stage: This detailed analysis is at the core of the evaluation process and, if carried out as comprehensively as possible, will throw up a good deal of information about the course material under scrutiny. the results of a detailed analysis provide the basis of successful evaluation and selection.
Analysis is more or less neutral, seeking information in a range of categories, and provides the necessary data for the second stage of the process.
The Fifth stage: evaluation, necessarily involves value judgments on the part of those involved. Such value judgments will inevitably be subjective to some extent and will reflect the views and priorities of those making them.
Evaluation will tend to be based on a number of factors, including the following: learner and teacher expectations; methodological preferences; the perceived needs of the learners; syllabus requirements; and personal preferences.
Sixth stage: Selection is the last stage of this process and involves matching the features identified during the previous stages against the requirements of a particular learning/teaching situation.
A Perfect Coursebook It is idealistic to expect a perfect fit, as coursebooks are produced for wide markets and cannot completely meet the demands of every individual class, but selecting within the material and adapting and supplementing it where necessary will overcome minor deficiencies.
Factors influencing the degree of dependence or autonomy in using coursebooks
• type of educational system/environment • syllabus/materials constraints imposed by education authorities • culture and expectations of learners • nature and amount of training for teachers • teachers' experience and confidence
• teachers' command of English (if non-native speakers) • availability of alternative coursebooks and resources for materials production.
Types of materials evaluation
Evaluation can take place before a coursebook is used during its use and after use, depending on circumstances and the purposes for which the evaluation is being undertaken.
Although probably the most common, pre-use evaluation is also the most difficult kind of evaluation as there is no actual experience of using the book for us to draw on. First In this case we are looking at future or potential performance of the coursebook.
Second In-use evaluation refers to coursebook evaluation whilst the material is in use, for example when a newly introduced coursebook is being monitored or when a well-established but again coursebook is being assessed to see whether it should be considered for replacement.
Third Post-use evaluation provides retrospective assessment of a coursebook's performance and can be useful for identifying strengths and weaknesses which emerge over a period of continuous use.
Evaluation of this kind can be useful in helping to decide whether to use the same coursebook on future occasions, particularly in respect of short self-contained courses which are repeated from time to time.
Purposes of materials evaluation
• The intention to adopt new coursebooks is a major and frequent reason for evaluation. • To identify particular strengths and weaknesses in coursebooks already in use, so that optimum use can be made of their strong points, whilst their weaker areas can be strengthened through adaptation or by substituting material from other books.
• Inevitably evaluation will involve elements of comparison, especially when coursebooks are in competition for adoption or where existing materials are being challenged by newly produced material.
• Coursebook analysis and evaluation is useful in teacher development and helps teachers to gain good and useful insights into the nature of the material.
Guideline One Coursebooks should correspond to learners' needs. They should match the aims and objectives of the language-learning programme. Aims and objectives can reflect learners' needs in terms of both language content and communicative abilities.
Guideline Two Coursebooks uses learners will make of the language. Select coursebooks which will help to equip students to use language effectively for their own purposes. should or reflect future) the (present which
we should also remember that such activities and teaching techniques are a means to an end and not an end in themselves. Learner-centred language teaching aims to bring learners to a point where they reach a degree of autonomy and are able to use the language themselves in real situations outside the classroom.
This progression from dependence on the teacher and on the coursebook towards growing confidence and independence is often difficult but it is crucial to the individual success of learners and to the success of teaching programmes.
Coursebooks can contribute to achieving this aim by incorporating authentic materials, creating realistic situations and encouraging learners to participate in activities which help develop communicative skills and strategies.
Guideline Three Coursebooks should take account of students' needs as learners and should facilitate their learning processes, without dogmatically imposing a rigid 'method'. Coursebooks help the learner to learn in a number of ways.
They select the items to be learned (grammar, functions, skills, etc), break them down into manageable units and sequence them in a way which is designed to lead from the familiar to the unfamiliar and from easier to more difficult items in terms of 'learnability'. Coursebooks can promote learning by contributing to student motivation.
An interesting coursebook, lively and well presented, with variety of topic and activity can be a powerful factor in strengthening the motivation of the learners, and often of teachers too.
Guideline Four Coursebooks should have a clear role as a support for learning. Like teachers, they mediate between the target language and the learner. Coursebooks facilitate learning, they bring the learner and the target language together, but in a controlled way.
Coursebooks provide exercises and activities designed to promote fluency in the use of English and they often give explanations or contextualized examples which help learners to understand how the language works.
Coursebooks support teachers by providing ready-made presentation material, ideas for teaching different topics, reading texts, listening passages, dialogues, etc, all carefully graded and accompanied by exercises and activities for class use.
