A Suggested Eclectic Checklist for ELT Coursebook Evaluation

Abstract

Coursebook evaluation helps practitioners decide on the most appropriate coursebook to be exploited. Moreover, evaluation process enables to predict the potential strengths and weaknesses of a given coursebook. Checklist method is probably the most widely adopted way of judging coursebooks and there are plenty of ELT coursebook evaluation checklists available designed for making material selection and evaluation process easier and systematic. As distinct from many other checklist development studies, this study attempts to suggest an eclectic checklist by borrowing items from quite different evaluation instruments available in the literature. Initially, more than thirty ELT coursebook evaluation forms and checklists were determined as a result of extensive review of literature. Afterwards, items were chosen from among those checklists by putting aside several of them on a utilitarian basis, accompanied by the researchers’ own items. We recommend that the resulting instrument be used by English language teachers, material developers and researchers.