Examining the effect of textbooks on the achievement of the objectives of the English teaching program

Foreign language education is one of the most important issues in our country. The English as a foreign language curriculum focuses on using the language communicatively and developing the four basic language skills. Textbooks have great importance as a material in the English teaching process, and it is seen that there are various textbooks for every level. It is also difficult to find the appropriate book for the program and the students among these textbooks. To overcome this difficulty, textbook evaluation studies are of great importance. It should be kept in mind that the textbook evaluation brings great responsibility to the evaluator; thus such an important task has to be done correctly. Based on this subject, in this study, the English textbook taught at the 8th grade level of our country's Primary Education was examined by using the ELT Coursebook Evaluation Checklist to determine whether it was suitable for the English teaching program and whether it met the textbook evaluation criteria; and student and teacher opinions regarding the book were also taken. For the data collection, the Textbook Evaluation Checklist for textbooks used in teaching English developed by Demir and Ertaş (2014), the Student Textbook Evaluation Form developed by Arıkan (2008) and the Teacher Interview Form prepared by the researcher were used. According to results of the study, it was concluded that the analyzed textbook was suitable for the program and was a good textbook; however, it was concluded that the opinions of students and teachers were generally negative and insufficent to meet the needs of the users.