Evaluation of tokens of Communicative Language Teaching in Prospect (1) of junior high school in Iran

Today, all over the world and in our country, the need to speak English has increased and has caused a lot of demand for learning this language. This need is met through various means such as formal education in schools and colleges, travel to English-speaking countries, and so on. But classroom teaching seems to be the most common opportunity for language learning; Therefore, the need for quality education and appropriate materials is inevitable. According to education experts, the textbook is a manifestation of the approved curriculum of the educational system. The textbook is one of the most important sources of learning in educational systems and is the main material of the school curriculum. Research on textbooks is necessary because it is used by many teachers and students effective in designing appropriate learning opportunities for students. Studying textbooks can reveal the connection between some of the students' learning difficulties and the curriculum and help to incorporate the concepts of the curriculum in the appropriate way in the textbooks. Authors of Prospect (1) have stated that the book was developed based on dynamic communicative language teaching approach. The present study evaluates all texts, pictures and exercises of the book in terms of communicative language teaching criteria to assess its effectiveness. The researcher attempts to investigate the application of communicative language teaching in the content of the book under study. The study addresses this question ‘to what extend the content of the book is in harmony with principles of communicative language teaching’.

It is a descriptive content analysis study. The instrument entails six components of communicative language teaching and has been validated through content analysis by 5 scholars. Data collection was done by three researchers working independently. Kappa agreement statistic is greater than 0.8 indicating satisfactory inter-rater reliability.

The results, analyzed through Shannon entropy revealed that group interaction (0.37), lingual communication (0.009), culture comparing (0.167), two by two communication (0.139), meaningfulness (0.079) and information gap (0.046) carried content weight. The book seems to be effective in terms of communicative language teaching principles.

Based on the obtained results, the importance of the components of communication approach in the 7th grade English textbook is as follows: 1. Strengthening group communication, 2. Adapting to the culture of the country, 3. Strengthening two-way communication, 4. Meaningful principle, 5. Information gap, 6. Lingual communication. The most prominent feature of this book is that it adequately addresses the components of the communication approach. Attention to strengthening group communication indicates that language teaching is moving away from the traditional method, which helps the learner a lot. Paying attention to the adaptation of the educational content to the culture of the country makes the content of the courses tangible and attractive and strengthens learning.