Commercial textbooks are doomed to disappoint user expectations to various extents because irrespective of origin (global/local), they are designed with an idealised classroom in mind, and their prescribed configuration probably won’t be compatible with the ever-diversifying contexts of L2 teaching and learning. Even in the case of a longtime bestseller, EFL teachers may need to customise the student-purchased materials often based on their perceived learning needs, and learner feedback is not as a rule sought on the mostly teacher-led modifications to the textbook content and procedures. Therefore, this study aimed to demonstrate how Maley’s (2011) inputs-processes-outcomes model could be used to evaluate and adapt an intermediate unit on modals of deduction, and examine how a multicultural group of 14 prep students from a major metropolitan state-run university in Turkey reacted to the teacher’s adaptive practices. Descriptive analyses of students’ activity ratings and retrospective reflections demonstrated that the addition of two scaffolded grammar tasks proved better for generating student interest and facilitating learning than replacement of another guessing game with the relatively more open and difficult task on video-based end-of-unit writing activity. Despite being independent users (B1), the participants indicated greater liking for the use of visual aids, ample practice opportunities, collaborative group work, explicit focus on grammar, and learner translations respectively. While their fewer dislikes mainly concerned video quality, activity difficulty and duration, there was almost unanimous agreement that they finally achieved to develop an increased awareness of how to use modality in English. A quick comparison of the 20-item quiz results also showed a considerable increase in their learning gains, for the mean number of correct answers more than doubled from pre- to post-test.
Much of the research on gender representations in language teaching materials has focused on providing frequency-based accounts of character appearances, familial/occupational role attributions and sexist language use. However, gender discrimination, when communicated visually, might more readily drop off the already overburdened teacher’s radar. Therefore, this study concentrated not just on the depiction of coursebook images but also on their relation to the learners, and aimed to discover the latent sexism in three thematically similar units from one global and two locally-produced coursebooks widely used in the Turkish and Iranian EFL contexts. A critical analysis of 41 images with Van Leeuwen’s (2008) framework revealed that male overrepresentation prevailed throughout all three resources, though to a lesser extent in the global coursebook. The characters mainly avoided direct contact with the viewers by averting their gaze and offered themselves as visual cues for denotative meanings. The global and Turkish-made series tended to position them both closer to the young readers and at their eye level to help build intimacy with more relatable role models. In their Iranian counterpart, the male and female characters were yet socially distanced from them through long shots taken from low and high angles respectively, in which case men were portrayed as authority figures to be looked up to, and women as the diminished other to be looked down on by the students. While both genders were oftener seen frontally in the Turkish EFL material with mixed-gender authorship, the all-male author teams preferred to show the male characters from an oblique angle to further detachment in the global and Iranian contexts. In establishing relatively closer, more personal and engaging interactions with both boys and girls visually, the global and Turkish EFL materials can be claimed to encode a more inclusive and equitable worldview than their Iranian counterpart.
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