Textbooks
for Students: How to Evaluate and Select Them?
Introduction
The most obvious and most common
form of material support for language instruction comes through textbooks
(Brown, 2007:188). A lot of materials are covered in textbooks. A lot of
language instructions and exercises are found out in textbooks. Almost all
sorts of language practice are covered in textbooks. By having so, the students
can do much on language learning. Whether textbooks will be much advantageous
or not to students, it depends much on the teacher and the students themselves
in making use of them. Practically, there seems no excuse to reject and neglect
textbooks.
Almost
every time a teacher enters the classroom to teach, there is a text book or
some text books with him/her and the students do the same thing as their
teacher does. The existence of textbooks as media in teaching and learning seems
to be a must. Moreover, in some areas where other materials are rarely found
out, textbooks may become holy books for the students.
The
use of a good textbook gives obvious advantages to both teacher and students
Harmer (1985:219). However, in fact, sometimes, some new or even old teachers
do not pay much attention to the textbooks they have for their teaching and
learning process. It means that they do not care whether the textbooks they and
the students have appropriately meet the requirements or criteria of good
textbooks. They commonly do what the ordinary teacher does every day. They
merely prepare the lesson plan and do teaching in the classroom. Yet, still they can make the textbooks more
useful regardless the quality of the textbooks themselves.
Having
skills and knowledge on evaluating and selecting textbooks is important for
teachers. Indeed, such kind of skill may be a matter of a must to be possessed by
teachers for they are the ones who are using the textbooks and are responsible
to what their students have on their teaching and learning process. That is
why, here the writer is going to discuss the way how to evaluate and select
good textbooks which meet the requirement or criteria of good learning
materials to use in the teaching and learning process.
What
are the criteria and the steps of evaluating and selecting textbooks?
Evaluating
and selecting textbooks for students needs certain skills based on certain
criteria of good textbooks. Some experts on language teaching have their own criteria
of good textbooks, however, here the writer would like to present the criteria
and the guidance and steps to evaluate textbooks based on one of them as
follows:
Textbook
evaluation criteria (adapted from Robinett, 1978, pp. 249-51):
1. Goals of the course
(Will this textbook help to accomplish your course goal?)
2. Background of the students
(Does the book fit the students’ background?)
a. age c. educational background
b. native
language and culture d.
motivation or purpose for learning
English
3. Approach
(Does the theoretical approach reflected in the book reflect a
philosophy
that you and your institution and your students can easily identify with?)
a.
theory of learning b.
theory of language.
4. Language skills
(Does the book integrate the “four skills”? Is there a balanced approach toward
the skills? Does the textbook emphasize skills which the curriculum also
emphasizes?
a.
listening c. speaking
b.
speaking d. writing
5. General content
(Does the book reflect what is now known about language
and language learning?)
a.
validity—does the textbook accomplish what it purports to?
b.
authenticity of language
c.
appropriateness and currency of topics, situation and contexts?
d.
proficiency level—is it pitched for the right level?
6.
Quality
of practice materials
a. exercises—is
there a variety from controlled to free?
b. clarity
of directions—are they clear to both students and teacher?
c. active
participation of the students—is this encouraged effectively?
d. grammatical
and other linguistic explanation—inductive or deductive?
e. review
material—are there sufficient spiraling and review exercises?
7. Sequencing
(How is the book sequenced?)
a.
by grammatical structure c.
by situation
b.
by skills d.
by some combination of the above
8. Vocabulary
(Does the book pay sufficient attention to word and word study?
a.
relevance b. frequency c.
strategies for word analysis
9.
General
sociolinguistic factors
a. variety
of English—American, British, dialects or international varieties
b. cultural
content—is there a cultural bias?
10. Format
(Is the book attractive, usable, and durable?)
a.
clarity of typesetting
b.
use of spatial notation (phonetic symbols, stress/intonation marking, etc)
c.
quality and clarity of illustrations
d.
general lay out—is it comfortable and not too “busy”?
e.
size of the book and binding
f.
quality of editing
g.
index, table of contents, chapter headings
11. Accompanying materials
(Are there useful supplementary materials?)
a. Workbook
c.
posters, flash cards, etc.
b. Tapes—audio
and/or video d. a set of tests
12. Teacher’s guide
(Is this useful?)
a. methodological
guidance
b. alternative
and supplementary exercises
c. suitability
for nonnative-speaking teacher
d. answer
key
The
twelve questions above are all the items used to evaluate and in turn to select
the appropriate textbooks to use in the teaching and learning process. However,
the scale of the score of each item can be developed by the teachers
themselves. As an alternative, here is the model of scoring each item whether
the textbook is classified to be excellent, good, fair, bad, or very bad.
|
Number of
Questions
|
Judgment
|
||||
|
Excellent
(Score 5)
|
Good
(Score 4)
|
Fair
(Score 3)
|
Bad
(Score 2)
|
Very Bad
(Score 1)
|
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1
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2
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3
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4
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5
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6
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7
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8
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9
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10
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11
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12
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Total
Score
|
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The
criteria of the total score can be as follows:
|
Total Score
|
Criteria of the Textbook
|
|
51-60
|
Excellent
|
|
41-40
|
Good
|
|
31-40
|
Fair
|
|
21-30
|
Bad
|
|
1-20
|
Very
Bad
|
The steps of doing the textbook
evaluation can be as follows: First of all is scoring the textbook on each item
of evaluation, the next step is counting the accumulation of the score of the
total numbers of items. By having this, the evaluator can draw the conclusion
what the criteria of the textbook under investigation belongs to.
The
teacher can have textbook evaluation by him/herself. However, it is suggested
that they do the textbook evaluation in groups. The more people evaluate a
textbook, the better judgment may the result be because by having a group in
evaluating the textbook, the evaluators can have detailed and comprehensive
discussion in scoring the items of evaluation.
Conclusion
Textbook evaluation is a kind of a
need to the teacher. Such activity is needed to have good textbooks that meet the
requirements of good textbook. Teachers must be sure that the textbooks used in
the teaching learning process, including the textbooks used by their students
are appropriate enough in terms of meeting the requirements to be good ones.
The teacher him/herself, the teachers in group, or the expert on textbook
evaluation can evaluate the textbooks before they are used in the teaching and
learning process.
Ideally, a teacher has an authority
to evaluate and select good textbooks for their class for he/she knows much
about the characteristics of their students. Yet, ironically, it often happens
that the teachers are in such a powerless position
that
have no choices to have good textbooks for the principal has had for them or
even the local government do in which the textbooks available might have not
undergone tight textbook evaluation an selection. If it happens to you, the
wise action is yours.
References:
Brown,
H. Douglas. 2007. Teaching by Principles:
An Interactive Approach to
Language
Pedagogy. New York: Longman
Harmer,
Jeremy. 1985. The Practice of English
Language Teaching. London:
Longman
By : SUKARDI
NIM : 100221509255
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