Foreign Languages
Mavadat Saidi; Soheila Nasiri
Abstract
English for academic purposes materials primarily focus on developing and enhancing the university students’ reading skills. The current study aimed to evaluate and compare the reading comprehension questions in the old and new generations of EAP textbooks published by SAMT. To this end, the reading ...
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English for academic purposes materials primarily focus on developing and enhancing the university students’ reading skills. The current study aimed to evaluate and compare the reading comprehension questions in the old and new generations of EAP textbooks published by SAMT. To this end, the reading comprehension questions in ten EAP textbooks (five old and five new) were identified and categorized in light of Freeman’s (2014) taxonomy. The results indicated that almost half of the questions were related to the Content category in the old textbooks while the highest frequency in the new ones belonged to the Language questions. Moreover, Lexical and Implicit comprehension types were the most frequent questions in both old and new textbooks. With regard to the Affect category, the evaluation type was the most common one. The results of Chi-square tests also revealed a significant difference between old and new EAP textbooks in terms of the frequency of content and language questions while no significant difference was found considering the effect questions. The findings of the current study carry pedagogical implications for EAP course design and material development.
