Merits and Demerits of the Newly-developed English Textbooks (Vision): High School Teachers' Perspectives

Over the past few decades, research in language learning and teaching has highlighted the role of teachers’ perceptions about English language teaching and learning in educational administration and materials planning. Recently, there has been a reform in Iranian high school English textbooks, developing new series of course books called “Prospect” and “Vision”. Hence, the need for exploring teachers’ perceptions about these newly-published textbooks is felt. Thus, the present study aims to investigate teachers’ perceptions about these textbooks (Vision series) in Iranian high schools to understand both challenges and difficulties associated with this change and opportunities and advantages of the changed textbooks for teachers teaching them. To this end, a textbook evaluation questionnaire was generated based on the guidelines of Richards (2001) and distributed among 56 high school teachers. Then from the pool of the participants, ten experienced and novice teachers attended the interview. SPSS software was used to analyze the questionnaire data and the interview data was analyzed using content analysis. The findings revealed that the majority of the participating teachers approved the curriculum innovation and reform. However, they stated that the experts who were involved in materials development seemed to have ignored teachers’ perceptions about the necessity of this reform and their readiness for it. This study, thus, has clear implications that teachers’ perspective can be included in curriculum innovation to improve the quality of the educational system.