Evaluating a Textbook

As there is such a collection of coursebooks to choose from, we teachers, responsible for choosing teaching materials, have to be able to make informed judgements about textbooks. Evaluation, however, needs to be done by considering the book in relation to its purpose (Richards 2001). A book might be ideal in one teaching situation but the same book, in a different teaching situation, may turn out to be quite unsuitable. The evaluation that will be explained in this book is a pre-use evaluation following Tomlinson’s (1998) recommended procedure for evaluating materials. It consists of twelve steps.