Learner's Perceptions

Teachers' and students’ perceptions play a crucial role in textbook evaluation. This paper examines English teachers' and students' perception of sociolinguistic features of Vision text books at senior high schools in Iran. To do so 5 male English teachers from various provinces of Iran, namely: Ilam, Lorestan, Kermanshah and Khouzestan, with an age range between 25 and 44, with 4 to 20 years experience and with a variety of academic degrees (1 PhD, 2 masters, 2 bachelors) were chosen to participate in the study, along with 5 high school students (1 grade 10, 2 grade 11 and 2 grade 12). The semi-structured interview consisted of 7 items, used to obtain participants' perceptions regarding textbook sociolinguistic features. An inductive and deductive thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. The target culture, gender and religion were represented in the deductive phase of analysis, and new themes emerged from the data in the inductive phase, including representation of races and ethnicities, dress codes, and traditions and customs. According to the findings, the majority of teachers and students believe that newly published EFL textbooks do not provide opportunities for students to improve their communicative competence and cultural awareness in the target language. Furthermore, they believed that male characters dominated the Vision series' texts and illustrations and Islamic ideology was dominant in the Vision series. Teachers, students, and ELT administrators, as well as textbook designers and materials creators, may benefit from the results of this study.