The paper describes the considerations that were taken into account in the development of a tentative English language textbook evaluation checklist. A brief review of the related literature precedes the crucial issues that should be considered in developing checklists. In the light of the previous evaluation checklists the developers created a list of the evaluative criteria on which the construct of the checklist could be established. The developers considered matters of validity, reliability and practicality in the process of its design; however, further research is in process to refine the checklist. Such an instrument could be used by curriculum designers, material developers and evaluators, as well as English language teachers.

The use of corpus-based findings in order to inform L2 teaching materials have been emphasized by many researchers owing to the fact that the studies of authentic texts have revealed some inconsistencies between the use of grammatical structures in corpora, and those found in language textbooks that are based purely on hunch. Therefore, by comparing a textbook corpus with the British National Corpus, this study attempts to shed light on the extent in which modal auxiliary verbs presented in the Malaysian prescribed textbooks are identical with those used by native speakers. The findings showed that there are discrepancies between English language textbooks and real language use. Findings from this study contribute to the improvement of pedagogical practices in the teaching of the modal system and provide a sense of familiarity with textbooks' content thus assisting educators in identifying the particular strengths and weaknesses in textbooks already in use.

The phenomenon of burnout has always been under scrutiny, especially with reference to the teachers and their demographics. This study has deliberately focused on the English teachers’ burnout and its relation with their demographics of age and workload in Malaysia. The findings showed that burnout is evident at high levels in all dimensions. In addition, some age and workload categories demonstrated significant relations with emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and reduced personal accomplishment. The findings would help school administrators consider such factors as important in the effectiveness of English teachers.

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This article presents a corpus-based investigation on English prepositions which are presented in three English language textbooks used by lower secondary schools in Malaysia. The aims were to find out the distributions of prepositions, its frequency order in comparison with the British National Corpus (BNC) and the differences in terms of their co-occurrence with other parts of speech. The findings showed that there is a difference between the textbook corpus and the BNC in terms of the frequency order of certain prepositions and there are similarities and differences in terms of their co-occurrence with other parts of speech. This study indicates the textbook corpus is essential in the study of prepositions and the results can guide teachers in deciding how best to supplement the text with activities that will give learners exposure to target grammar item that is not sufficiently presented in the textbook.