Textbook Evaluation: Vocabulary Development in My Book of English

Abstract

The present research work is an attempt to evaluate an English textbook used in the Algerian middle school entitled My Book of English, the focus being on vocabulary development. Throughout the research work, we have tried to find out whether the rubrics devoted to vocabulary development in the textbook comply with the techniques and strategies put forward by applied linguistics and EFL teaching. To reach our purpose and carry out our research, we have relied on Paul Nation’s (2001) approach to vocabulary learning. This theory is based on three major strategies for leaning vocabulary: planning, source and process.Our analytic categories are borrowed from Alan Cunningsworth’s checklist for evaluating a textbook, since a checklist is one of the most common instruments used in textbook evaluation. Our study corpus consists of the sections and rubrics that concern vocabulary development in the textbook under scrutiny. For the sake of analyzing the data, we have made use of a mixed-method research, a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, as well as a descriptive analytical method which is content analysis for the interpretation of the results