REFLECTION : WEEK 6, TUTORIAL TASK

For this week, we were assigned to do a presentation based on the given articles of checklist to evaluate a coursebook or material. For my group, we need to prepare a presentation on Sheldon’s ‘Evaluating ELT textbooks and materials’. We need to go through the articles and ttry to grasp the concept of evaluating a textbook that Sheldon is trying to convey. From the checklist provided, we realized that the rating given for each criteria depend closely on who is doing the evaluation. This is due to the fact that each party that involve with the textbook and material evaluation have different priorities in selecting the most suitable coursebook to be integrate a particular classroom. For instance, teachers most probably think the rationale of the textbook over other characteristic while, the administration might consider the suffiency criteria as a crucial factor in evaluating a textbook.

Compare to other checklist such as Grant’s, William’s and Littlejohn’s, Sheldon’s checklist seems to be more user friendly because it does not include a complex evaluation process. Nevertheless, Sheldon’s checklist is more suitable to be used to evaluate as a whole. This is because the items in the checklist are not spesific enough to evaluate a textbook down to the linguistic content.

We also realized that each checklist has its own flaws but it is interesting how different author come out with these checklists. The structure of the checklist might seems different but the aim is the same which is to evaluate a coursebook to determine wether it is convenient to be use and also to look for room of improvement.