Foreign Languages
Simin Sattarpour; Assef Khalili; Maryam Zeinolabedini
Abstract
Book evaluation is considered a prerequisite to developing or republicating educational books. Therefore, utilizing an evaluation checklist, 12 university professors, selected through purposive and convenience sampling, evaluated two ESP books in nursing, published by Oxford University Press and SAMT. ...
Read More
Book evaluation is considered a prerequisite to developing or republicating educational books. Therefore, utilizing an evaluation checklist, 12 university professors, selected through purposive and convenience sampling, evaluated two ESP books in nursing, published by Oxford University Press and SAMT. The findings of the qualitative analysis revealed that the book published by SAMT, no longer seems suitable for today's students. Quantitative analysis indicated that Mean score given to SAMT’s book was significantly lower than Oxford’s. Despite the lack of visual appeal and audio-video files, little variety in the teaching and testing methods, with the old reading-oriented approach, without paying attention to phonetics and grammatical issues, and being far from the language teaching theories, this book has recently been republished for the nineteenth time. Although the problems underlined in SAMT’s book are not observed in the Oxford’s, this book is not error-free, either. It does not fully meet the needs of Iranian students since its major focus is on language use in the career-related contexts with an equal attention to all skills. This comparison can help the authors and syllabus designers in the field of nursing to prepare, compile, and edit books, using the strengths of the existing books.
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 ...
Read More
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.