Screening EFL Teachers’ Perception on ‘Prospect 1’: The Case of Internal and External Evaluation

Since 2012, the ELT experts of Iran’s Ministry of Education have developed and published series titled ‘Prospect’ which includes three successive textbooks designed for teaching English to the students of grades 7th, 8th and 9th of junior high schools of Iran. It is a fact that the key components of all educational programs are the textbooks, the efficiency of which contributes to the accomplishment of the pedagogical goals of the curriculum. With the goal of helping Iranian materials developers modify ‘Prospect’ series and improve the overall quality of the very textbooks, this study aimed to conduct evaluation over one of the series namely ‘Prospect 1’ through screening EFL teachers' perception who have been incorporating the textbook in their online and conventional classrooms at least during the last five years. By emulating a model provided by McDonough and Shaw (1993) on the basis of external and internal evaluation of textbooks, a 55 -five -point Likert scale questionnaire was adapted by the researchers and the required data were gathered from 46 female and 58 male English teachers in urban and rural junior high schools of Gilan and Mazandaran provinces of Iran. The findings revealed that EFL teachers were relatively dissatisfied with some important facets of ‘Prospect 1.’ Our respondents believed that the textbook is really poor in printing quality, and it lacks attractive and motivating pictures and illustrations. Moreover, not incorporating variant dialects and authentic language, not using modern techniques such as typography and perceptual saliency, and not considering the needs of the learners or different learning styles, are among other shortcomings that seem to be in dire need of modification.