Developing a Textbook Evaluation Scheme for the Expanding Circle

Among the four important factors in the educational contexts, namely, teachers, learners, textbooks and contexts, textbooks play an important role in English Language Teaching (ELT), particularly in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom where it provides the primary source of linguistic input. The wealth of published material for English language teaching (ELT) available in the market makes selecting the right coursebook a challenging task. As such, it necessitates developing a textbook evaluation scheme so that the stakeholders benefit from the proposed model as a dependable criterion with regard to selecting the most appropriate textbook among the wealth of published textbooks. Taking these points into consideration, this study aimed at investigating and evaluating the available textbook evaluation schemes and checklists and seeking the experts’ viewpoints with the objective of developing and designing a textbook evaluation scheme pertinent and beneficial to the expanding circle. As such, the existing textbooks evaluation schemes were reviewed critically and the experts’ viewpoints were sought. Accordingly, a textbook evaluation scheme consisting of 6 main factors containing 41 items has been developed and proposed.