Critical Analysis and Teachers’ Perspectives on Prospect One (Iranian Junior High School English Book

Abstract

During educational innovation, textbooks play a crucial role as agents for change because they provide a picture of what the change is going to look like (Hutchinson & Torres, 1994). In 2013, following the revision policy of school curricula, the Iranian Ministry of Education renewed English teaching methodology from Reading Method to Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and as a result new English book series entitled “English for schools” was published. Following CLT principles, the new series, among other objectives, is trying to promote learners’ communicative competences in English. Considering the crucial role of textbooks in ELT program, this study aimed to investigate that to what extent Prospect 1 (the first volume of the above mentioned series) has the characteristics of a CLT syllabus, and what the strengths and weaknesses of Prospect 1 are. To this end, the textbook was scrutinized with reference to Cunningsworth's (1995) checklist. The findings revealed that the syllabus has made great progress in language teaching methodology in Iran and has been able to partially satisfy the learners' and teachers' needs. However, it has some deficiencies which are the lack of proper recycling of vocabularies, lack of phonetic transcription of new words and use of unauthentic contexts. To gain further insight into teachers' perception of the book, some English teachers were also interviewed. They believed although the book is a great progress compared to its predecessors, it has some shortcomings which the present study delves into.