Vision 3

The current comparative study aimed to juxtapose the newly compiled English textbook for the students in the third grade of senior high school, Vision 3, and the previously taught English textbook for pre-university students. To this end, 130 experienced teachers, with the experience of teaching both textbooks, were asked to complete an eclectic checklist comprising 38 items and evaluating the book in terms of nine major criteria, namely general considerations, vocabulary, grammar, speaking, listening, reading, writing, pronunciation supplementary materials, tasks, and activities. Following that, 20 teachers were interviewed to enrich the results of the quantitative data. Overall, the results revealed the teachers’ contentment with the newly developed English textbook. In particular, the mean values indicated that English teachers rated the speaking and listening sections as the most satisfactory parts while they ranked the supplementary materials criterion as the least satisfactory one in Vision 3. Indeed, they believed that notwithstanding the dramatically positive changes in Vision 3, the book still requires undergoing major revisions to act as a rich source for enabling the EFL students to communicate fluently, accurately, and effectively. In this regard, the findings would benefit the materials developers to locate the areas for further modifications.

Textbook evaluation seems to be inevitable where textbooks are the main source of teaching and learning processes. This study aimed to investigate to what extent ''Vision 3'' (the last volume of the English book series entitled “English for schools”) has the characteristics of a CLT syllabus based on teachers’ points of view. To fulfill the objectives of this study, 60 male and female high school English teachers, teaching at different high schools answered an online questionnaire adapted from AbdelWahab (2013) which is a 3-point Likert scale checklist (i.e. poor, satisfactory, & good). The design of the scale enabled the researchers to evaluate the book in terms of four main criteria including; (1) physical and utilitarian attributes, (2) efficient outlay of objectives and supplementary materials, (3) learning/teaching content, and (4) language skills. The analysis of the data indicated that EFL teachers had a positive attitude towards the English textbook based on the CLT principles except for cultural considerations. The conclusion indicates that the book needs to be modified to include some aspects of cultural values about the target language culture. The results can guide the teachers, syllabus designers, textbook writers, evaluators, and curriculum designers in their planning and designing of future textbooks.

Reading passages act as the locus of comprehensible input in the English language teaching materials and are mostly followed by a host of activities to ensure the learners’ comprehension. The current study aimed to carry out a comparative evaluation of Vision 3 and Learning to Read (i.e., English for Pre-university Students) in terms of the reading sections. To this end, Freeman’s taxonomy of reading comprehension questions was used. To enrich the quantitative data, thirty-two English teachers were also interviewed. The results revealed the prevalence of Language questions in both textbooks. However, the least common types of questions were Affect and Content in the old and new textbook, respectively. The results of Chi-square tests unfolded a significant difference between the two textbooks in terms of three categories of questions. The analysis of the teachers’ responses corroborated the findings of the quantitative phase. The teachers seemed satisfied with the inclusion of more Affect questions in Vision 3; nevertheless, they believed that the new English textbook needed to be revised in terms of the quantity and quality of reading texts and tasks in order to shape and expand the students’ reading comprehension skills. The findings carry pedagogical implications for the materials developers and English teachers.