Assessment of Course Book Farsi Shirin Ast Based on the Cunningsworth's indices

Nowadays there are abundant resources for learning Persian (Farsi); nevertheless, among these available references, it is necessary to select books that meet the requirements of language learners and instructors. Evaluation of educational references seems to be necessary for getting familiar with methods of preparing educational books and selecting suitable resources; it requires scrutinizing available references via considering indices regarded as basics. The purpose of the present article is evaluating the elementary book titled “Farsi Shirin Ast “(2010), which means “Persian is a sweet language”; the evaluation is based on indices for evaluation of textbooks introduced by Cunningsworth. The set of Farsi Shirin Ast is written by Pouneh Shabani Jadidi and Dominic Parviz Brookshaw; it`s a book that attempts to teach grammatical as well as communicative competence simultaneously. Writers believe that this book is suitable for both native speakers of Persian, already familiar with this language, and non-native speakers of Persian who are learning Persian as foreign language. This book consists of 15 chapters; in each chapter different language skills are merged. Writers have stated that the key characteristics of this book include teaching language through conversation, using text with different topics (culture, history and Iranian traditions), teaching pronunciation by means of imitating the audio files, having comprehensive Persian-English and English-Persian dictionary, using controlled practices for stability of learning new grammatical points, making a link between new information and language learners` previous knowledge. The entire book, except the first chapter that teaches Persian alphabet, consists of merging several language learning skills. Each chapter consists of specific structure that follows pre-determined path for language learning. For evaluation of this book, 30 indices introduced by Cunningsworth were considered. In Cunningsworth`s book a wide range of evaluation questions is offered for evaluating the characteristics of textbooks. Cunningsworth has introduced 45 criteria for revising a textbook; these criteria are classified as follows: goals and approaches, organizing, linguistic content, skills, subject, methodology, teacher’s book and applied considerations. Chapters 3-12 introduce indices for evaluating textbooks and for each index, some questions are suggested. In this article, except specialty indices for a specific skill, other indices including educational assistant references for teaching/learning methods, studying methods, manual book of teacher, Persian educational materials for specific goals as well as other indices are evaluated. Examination of the mentioned indices revealed that in spite of attempts for meeting requirements necessary for teaching language, set of books titled “Farsi Shirin Ast” is very far from standard educational package; the reasons are as follows: lack of diversity of communication assignments, lack of enough attention to listening and writing skills, left to right book binding and artificial audio files that lack background information.