MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY
---------------------------

AN EVALUATION OF THE TEXTBOOK
“ENGLISH ID 1” USED AT TRI DUC HIGH SCHOOL
Submitted to the
Faculty of English Language
in partial fulfillment of the Master’s degree in English Language

Course code: 1641900017
By

PHAM VAN MANH
Supervised by

Dr. LE VAN TUYEN

HO CHI MINH CITY, March/2018


MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
HO CHI MINH CITY UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY
---------------------------

AN EVALUATION OF THE TEXTBOOK
“ENGLISH ID 1” USED AT TRI DUC HIGH SCHOOL
Submitted to the
Faculty of English Language
in partial fulfillment of the Master’s degree in English Language



2

Dr. LE THI THANH

Reader 1

3

Dr. TRAN QUOC THAO

Reader 2

4

Dr. PHAM NGUYEN HUY HOANG

Member

5

Dr. NGUYEN DANG NGUYEN

Secretary Member

On behalf of the Board of Examiners
Chair


HCMC, April 6th 2018

III- Starting date: 01/08/2017
IV- Completing date : 17/03/2018
V- Academic supervisor: Dr. LE VAN TUYEN

SUPERVISOR

LE VAN TUYEN

FACULTY DEAN


i

CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY
I certify my authorship of the Master’s thesis submitted today entitled:

AN EVALUATION OF THE TEXTBOOK
“ENGLISH ID 1” USED AT TRI DUC HIGH SCHOOL

In terms of the statement of requirements for Theses in Master’s programs issued by
the Higher Degree Committee of Faculty of English Language, Ho Chi Minh City
University of Technology.
Ho Chi Minh City, March/ 2018

PHAM VAN MANH


ii

RETENTION AND USE OF THE THESIS

contribution, enthusiastic engagement in the survey for questionnaires and
interviews.
I would like to thank my classmates who provided me a number of sincere
advices and shared with me a lot of knowledge and learning experience during the
course. Without their help, I think I could have never been completed the courses.
Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my family for their
spiritual as well as material supports, especially, my wife who has always supported
and encouraged me to overcome all the difficulties in completing this study.


iv

ABSTRACT
Textbooks play a key component in most language teaching programs. A
textbook seems to become the main tool for teachers to convey language knowledge
to English as a foreign language (EFL) learner. The present study aims to
investigate students' and teachers’ attitudes and perceptions towards the textbook
“English ID 1” which used at Tri Duc High School (TDHS) at the pre-intermediate
level and the extent the teachers use and exploit the textbook in the
classroom. Through the investigation, strengths and weaknesses of the textbook
itself as well as of the way it is exploited are elucidated and recommendations are
made for both designers and teachers. 308 students and 18 teachers comprising
males and females participated in this study. The instruments employed in the study
were a textbook evaluation questionnaire adapted and modified from some variety
checklists of many researchers, semi-structured interviews with ten students and
five teachers and classroom observations. The 42-item questionnaire using 5-point
Likert scale rating from “1=Strongly Disagree” to “5=Strongly Agree” was
employed to elicit participants’ response to six main categories including Overall
Assessment, Practical Consideration, Language Skills, Subject and Content,
Organization and culture. Descriptive statistics were carried out to interpret the

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW .................................................................... 9
2.1 Introduction ............................................................................................ 9
2.2 Theoretical Foundation .......................................................................... 9
2.2.1 Materials and Textbooks .............................................................................9
2.2.1.4 Advantages and Disadvantages of the textbook and its roles in the classroom
........................................................................................................... 14
2.2.2 Textbooks Evaluation ................................................................................19
2.3 Some review of previous studies ......................................................... 30
2.3.1 Studies on textbook evaluation in Vietnam...............................................31
2.3.2 Studies on textbook evaluation at overseas ...............................................33
2.4 Summary .............................................................................................. 39
CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY ............................................................................ 40


vi

3.1 Introduction .......................................................................................... 40
3.2 Research site ........................................................................................ 40
3.3 Participants of the study....................................................................... 41
3.3.1 Students .....................................................................................................41
3.3.2 Teachers .....................................................................................................43
3.4 Description of the textbook.................................................................. 44
3.5 Research Method ................................................................................. 47
3.6 Research instruments ........................................................................... 49
3.6.1 Questionnaire .............................................................................................49
3.6.2 Interviews ..................................................................................................53
3.6.3 Classroom Observation .............................................................................54
3.7 Data Collection .................................................................................... 55
3.7.1 Procedure of conducting questionaires ............................................. 56
3.7.2 Procedure of conducting interviews ................................................. 57

LIST OF TABLES
Table 3.1: Demographic Profile of Students. ........................................................ 41
Table 3.2: Demographic Profile of Teachers. ....................................................... 43
Table 3.3: Language Map of Unit 1 ....................................................................... 46
Table 3.4: Reliability analysis of scales ................................................................. 52
Table 3.5: Coding for Classroom Observations ................................................... 55
Table 4.1 Descriptive Statistics for the Overall Assessments .............................. 62
Table 4.2 Descriptive Statistics for the Practical Consideration ........................ 64
Table 4.3 Descriptive Statistics for the Language Skills ..................................... 66
Table 4.4 Descriptive Statistics for Subject and Content .................................... 71
Table 4.5 Descriptive Statistics for the Organization .......................................... 73
Table 4.6: Descriptive Statistics for the Culture .................................................. 74
Table 4.7: Number of Units and Time distribution for each semester .............. 77
Table 4.8: Content Division and Time Allocation ................................................ 79


ix

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
EFL:

English as a Foreign Language

ELT:

English Language Teaching

MOET:

Ministry of Education and Training

students accomplish their own teaching and learning objectives. Besides, the
textbooks also influence teachers seriously, because they provide patterns and
guidelines to teachers so that they could teach in a better way and help the students
for better learning. Although recent technological innovations have helped much for
education to teach in new ways and to reach new goals, the published textbooks are
still the most commonly used source material for most instructional situations.
Hence, many new commercial textbooks are regularly published to serve for the
changing focuses of instruction and the changing language learners’ needs in
language learning and teaching process. That is the reason why it is important to


2

decide on which language textbooks are most useful for both students and teachers
in the particular situation.
Nowadays, a number of English teaching materials on the market have been
growing increasingly, making the choice of a good textbook seem to be a
challenging task. Tomlinson (2003) states that the research about materials
development did not have enough attention until the 1990s when textbooks on this
subject started to be published and materials or textbooks evaluation has become a
new trend in the process of language learning and teaching. Textbook evaluation is
the significant importance because it leads to a much better understanding of the
nature of particular learning and teaching contexts. Furthermore, the analysis and
evaluation of what is happening in the learning and teaching situation are going to
provide the teachers with more accurate information about the nature of the
exploited textbooks. The textbook evaluation of some teachers is more important
than designing courses because their schools usually force them to teach from a
textbook which was designed for their own teaching purposes. When a textbook has
been selected and purchased, then there is the responsibility to exploit it even if it is
not highly suitable for a particular purpose or situation. Thus, it is worth spending

textbook is important in conducting an evaluation to ensure that it is suitable and
certain criteria must be considered in the evaluation process. Hence, every school
has different objectives and students have different backgrounds, abilities and needs
so the criteria of textbooks will vary. Tomlinson (1996) also suggests that material
evaluation process can be seen as the way to develop our language understanding
which will contribute to both acquisition theory and pedagogic practices
The selection of the textbook will base on the curriculum’s overall
orientation of every school but it is important to focus on approaches and
syllabuses, which are understood as ways of defining what the students really need
to learn and syllabuses cover all instructional objectives, techniques, and exercises,
language items as well as the four skills (Brown, 1995). Moreover, Cunningsworth
(1995) mentions that all of the textbooks reflect the purposes, methods and values
of the curriculum, so it is very important that the textbook must be selected
carefully. Its aim should be found out in order to meet the needs and interests of the
students to the highest level. Additionally, when selecting a textbook, policy-


4

makers, managers or teachers should look over some elements such as context,
beliefs about how people learn languages, students’ needs and interests, and student
diversity (Graves, 2000; Butcher et al., 2006). Furthermore, the textbooks should be
consistent with the studying level, have the expectations on students clearly, help
students engage their learning to their own knowledge or experience, provide
opportunity for students to review in their learning and allow students to attend in
meaningful interaction with one another for communicative purposes (Wajnryb,
1995; Cunningsworth, 1995)
Habtoor (2012) states that some textbooks are published annually in the world
and a number of them are designed mainly for ESL and EFL situations. This result
is very different from among teachers, especially the teachers having little or no

Nowadays, English education starts in kindergarten and continues to
university in Vietnam. From kindergarten to secondary school the students learn
reading, writing, listening and the basic grammatical rules of speaking. They learn
more advanced English at the high school, including more sophisticated grammar,
pronunciation, vocabulary and other skills. Therefore, all high schools usually
choose to learn with more other materials to help their students get the knowledge
better and better. This leads to the appearance of the more published textbooks
which have not been evaluated about content and quality carefully yet to meet these
needs.
In English language teaching context in Vietnam, the field of textbook
evaluation so far has some limitations while the publishing of ELT materials is
growing dramatically. Firstly, At TDHS, the policy-makers have been using English
ID series for the courses “English for Communication” and they hope to help
students improve their English skills. However, till now, there are not any
evaluation conducted to examine the strong and weak points of English ID series or
to acquire teachers and learners’ perspectives and attitudes toward the textbooks
since they are published and applied into some Vietnamese high schools and some
foreign language centers. Secondly, as an English teacher at TDHS for 2 years, the
researcher recognized that there are many existing problems in using the English ID
series from teachers’ and students’ perceptions. Some students also stated that
although they could reach the positive results of the course, they still could not
apply linguistic knowledge and skills studied in real life, as well as communicating


6

on the daily activities. Thus, it is necessary to get teachers and students to raise their
voice about these issues. In order to fill the gap in this field, the researcher
conducted this study to explore teachers’ and students’ attitudes and perceptions
towards the English ID textbook as well as examining how the appropriateness of

the researcher wants to discover the extent the teachers use and exploit the textbook
in the classroom which will help English teaching and learning at TDHS and some
language centers become more interesting and effective in the future.

1.5 Scope of the study
This study focuses on the textbook English ID 1 used in English teaching and
learning at the TDHS in Tan Phu District of Ho Chi Minh city. Thus, these results
cannot apply to all districts in the Ho Chi Minh City as well as all other high
schools in Vietnam. In fact, there are four textbooks in this English ID series but the
researcher chooses only English ID 1 to evaluate. Moreover, this study bases on the
criteria of good textbooks and focuses on the appropriateness of the analyzed
textbooks. Furthermore, the textbook is intended for high school students who are
considered young learners of the level of pre-intermediate. As a result, some
suggestions made and implications drawn in the study cannot easily be generalized
to textbooks for other English learners at different schools

1.6 Significance of the study
The results of the study may help the administrators, teachers, students have
an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the textbooks in order to adapt the
textbooks more effectively in their educational setting and to meet the objectives of
the course. Consequently, the results might be beneficial for all users including
teachers and students and useful for the curriculum developers, policymakers or
publishers in selecting or developing a textbook. Moreover, the results would be the
useful recommendations for teaching and learning English at TDHS to become
more successfully and effectively. It is fully hoped that the recommendations
emanated from this study will be one of the ideas to be considered when the MOET
of Vietnam embrace changes in the EFL curriculum.

1.7 Organization of the thesis
The researcher is going to organize this study in order to get the reader easier

chapter reviews four major parts relevant literature review. First are materials and
textbooks in language learning and teaching with the definition of them, textbook
design, the advantages and disadvantages of textbooks, the roles, use and
exploitation of textbook in English language classroom. The second part discusses
textbook evaluation which contains the definition of textbook evaluation, the reason
for evaluating the textbook, the methods of textbook evaluation and criteria for
textbook evaluation to help the reader more comprehension about the textbook
evaluation process. In third one, the researcher is going to give the theoretical
framework for textbook evaluation in the classroom. The fourth one will describe
some previous textbook evaluation studies consist of both studies in Vietnam and at
overseas.

2.2 Theoretical Foundation
2.2.1 Materials and Textbooks
2.2.1.1 Materials
Some people estimated that a textbook carries a bit more weight in the
consideration of the material. However, according to Tomlinson (2001) states the
materials consist of anything which can be used to facilitate the teaching and
learning languages. In the other words, materials also are the form of a textbook, a
workbook, a CD-Rom, a video, a photocopied handout, a cassette, a newspaper, a
paragraph written on a whiteboard or anything that presents or informs related to the
language knowledge being learned. These kinds of materials can be exploited easily


10

and effectively for language learning and teaching process. The term textbooks and
coursebooks often interchangeably used in English language teaching process.
Therefore, in this master thesis the terms ‘textbook,’ ‘coursebook,’ and ‘material’
are usually used interchangeably.

defines the textbook as one of the materials used to help teachers and learners.
Hutchinson and Torres (1994) say that a textbook is as an instruction for teachers in
teaching approach, and as a tool for learners to revise knowledge. Besides, it is also
believed a record for measuring what has been taught by the teachers. Tomlinson
and Masuhara (2010) mention that a number of issues which need to be considered
carefully before starting to write a textbook such as needs analysis, language
learning principles, the target of students and teachers. These are the important
matters which are looked over in this study to find out suitable textbooks for
different situations. Besides, they also have much benefit for both teachers and
students in learning and teaching process. Additionally, textbooks are as a principle
which serves as a guide to be used in a systematic way in the classroom as a basis of
language course (Ur, 1996). Furthermore, they are also specifically designed for the
specific target to learners in particular context. Additionally, the traditional textbook
often has a number of chapters with differences long texts that deal with various
topics (Cecilia, 2006). Moreover, there is a different theme for each chapter and
sometimes there are some pre-reading activities or post-reading exercises and they
can often be listened to on CD or tape. In many cases, the textbook and the
workbook are sometime joined together in the same book, but sometimes they are
represented by two separate books. In fact, a textbook is always accompanied by
other materials such as CDs, cassettes, tests and a teacher’s guide.

2.2.1.3 Textbook Design
Prowse (1998, 2011) reports that inspiration comes writers’ hands cannot
follow the speed of their thoughts. However, when they do not have ideas, it is
frustrating (Tomlinson, 2003). “Many of the materials developers describe materials
writing processes which are ad hoc and spontaneous and which rely on an intuitive
feel for activities which are likely to work”(Tomlinson, 2003, p.107). In spite of
admitting that writing is free and spontaneous, Tomlinson and Masuhara (2010)
mention a number of issues which need to be considered carefully before preparing


impression for users before they consider other ones.