The History of Arabic Textbook Development Based on Principles and Approaches of Foreign Language Teaching from 1961 to 2017

This study intended to investigate the history of the development of Arabic textbooks of high schools in the field of Literature and Humanities from 1961 to 2017. The study employed content analysis through which the history of Arabic textbook development was scrutinized based on educational purposes, teacher and students’ relationships, roles of teachers and students, culture and language perspective, use of mother tongue, affective factors of students, assessment methods, learning and teaching methods, and language skills. The results of this research suggested that the dominant method in these textbooks was grammar-translation method because they focused on translating texts and teaching grammatical structures. In two recent decades, some transformational generative grammar exercises, deductive teaching methods, Ta’rib (translating into Arabic) and simple conversations have been added to books as if they have been trying to approach and focus on the audio-lingual method. According to some educational purposes in Iran’s high schools, this research suggested some active strategies for reading comprehension instead of transformational generative grammar exercises, substitution and word/text translation. Besides, it puts more emphasis on group activities instead of individual or teacher-centered ones.