A Comparative Study of American English File and New Headway English Course

ABSTRACT: Textbooks play an essential role in the language learning process. The difficulty is that among a wide range of textbooks in the market,there are a lot ofoptions which make the process of book selection even harder. Therefore, book evaluation is a vital process, and it has great impact on the process of learning and teaching. In order to evaluate ELT textbooks, theorists and writers have offered different kinds of evaluative frameworks based on a number of principles and criteria. To this end, two EFL textbooks namely New Headway English Courseand American English File which are commonly taught in language institutes in Iranwere selected for evaluation by seeking the teachers’ viewpoints on the effectiveness of the two textbooks. Twenty ELT teachers helped the researcher rate the evaluative checklists. A modified version of [1] teacher textbook evaluation form was used to collect data.The results indicated that the differences between the two textbooks were not significant in four features including practical considerations, layout and design, activities, and skills, but they proved to be different in some other features including language type as well as subject and content.
KEYWORDS: Textbook evaluation, Litz’s framework, American English File, New Headway English Course