Evaluation of the English Book (Prospect 1) for First-Grade Junior Secondary School Focusing on Critical Discourse Analysis Features: Representation of Gender and Power Relations

As a piece of mixed-method research, the present study scrutinized the English book, namely Prospect 1 or Book 7, for first- grade junior secondary school both subjectively and objectively. To this end, 21 teachers completed an expert-judged, 23- item five-point Likert-scale ELT book evaluation questionnaire. Ten of the teachers, who were selected randomly and whose informed consent was also obtained, sat a semi-structured interview as well. The researcher also evaluated Book 7 subjectively drawing upon the 23-criteria checklist mentioned above especially with regard to representation of such crucial critical discourse analysis features as gender and power relations. The results of descriptive statistics of the questionnaire and content analysis of interviews revealed although Book 7 enjoyed such advantages as emphasis on aural-oral skills, relatively proper physical lay-out, and availability of supplementary materials, it suffered such serious shortcomings as lack of authentic materials and existence of culturally- biased materials. The materials and topics were also found not to be of interest to both students and teachers and the situations and functions were found to be mainly restricted to a certain context (i.e. classroom and school). Also the results of inferential statistics (i.e. Chi- square analysis) revealed there was a statistically significant difference between representation of males and that of females in the Book. However, no significant difference was detected between equal and unequal power relations.