English as a foreign language teachers' coursebook dependency

The influence which coursebooks have on learners as the main language learning tools is axiomatic. The way they are implemented in language classrooms can lead to positive and negative outcomes equally and this necessitates a critical approach to language teaching by means of these tools which have been taken for granted for decades so far. The primary purpose of this study is to investigate how dependent English language teachers are on coursebooks and whether there are any relationships between teachers' coursebook dependency levels and their genders, experiences, educational backgrounds. A 'Coursebook Dependency Questionnaire' was developed to conduct this study as the literature did not provide an appropriate scale to measure the desired construct. Therefore, the study has two main aspects which include analyses for the validity and the reliability of the scale developed and the analyses of the data gathered by the 'Coursebook Dependency Questionnaire' to answer the research questions. The current study was carried out mainly at a state and private university as well as primary and secondary schools in Gaziantep with a total of 324 respondents. Participants working at private and state universities and schools throughout Turkey were also sent questionnaires by e-mail (N=58) or requested to fill in an online questionnaire (N=18). The data was collected through the coursebook dependency questionnaire which was designed for this study and reliability value was found to be .90. The results revealed that majority of the participants (N=223) were medium dependent on coursebooks in their teaching practices while the number of high (N=89) and low (N=12) dependent teachers on coursebooks comprised less than half of the participants in total. The analyses of the relationships in gender, experience and educational backgrounds with regards to coursebook dependency levels indicated no statistically significant differences among these variables although one might expect negative correlations between the years of experience and dependency levels of teachers.