Prospect 1 and Four Corners 1 in the Spotlight: Textbook Evaluation with Some Reference to Critical Discourse Analysis

As an analytical type of approach, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) deals with the emphasis on social practice, identity, power, and ideology built through text and speech in socio-political and educational contexts. Having proposed a theoretical framework, it uncovered all discrepant ways through which power and societal practices are produced in written and spoken texts. Moreover, mingled with text and talk, textbooks play a pivotal role in determining a standard curriculum. To this end, using a mixed-methods design, a questionnaire was applied to compare the perceptions of 103 Iranian EFL teachers of Yasouj, Dehdasht, and Gachsaran English institutes and junior high schools with each other towards the Prospect 1 and Four Corners 1 textbooks. Furthermore, a semi-structured interview was also conducted from 9 teachers. Descriptive statistics and content analysis were applied for analyzing the data. The results revealed that the two textbooks differed in terms of ‘layout’, ‘language type’, and ‘whole aspect’ whereas they were similar in light of ‘activities’, ‘content’, and ‘skills’. Also, findings gained from the interview suggest that the textbooks more or less failed to consistently take the needs of language learners into account. This study might be beneficial to textbook designers and language teachers and learners.