پوریا برزن

Teachers' and students’ perceptions play a crucial role in textbook evaluation. This paper examines English teachers' and students' perception of sociolinguistic features of Vision text books at senior high schools in Iran. To do so 5 male English teachers from various provinces of Iran, namely: Ilam, Lorestan, Kermanshah and Khouzestan, with an age range between 25 and 44, with 4 to 20 years experience and with a variety of academic degrees (1 PhD, 2 masters, 2 bachelors) were chosen to participate in the study, along with 5 high school students (1 grade 10, 2 grade 11 and 2 grade 12). The semi-structured interview consisted of 7 items, used to obtain participants' perceptions regarding textbook sociolinguistic features. An inductive and deductive thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. The target culture, gender and religion were represented in the deductive phase of analysis, and new themes emerged from the data in the inductive phase, including representation of races and ethnicities, dress codes, and traditions and customs. According to the findings, the majority of teachers and students believe that newly published EFL textbooks do not provide opportunities for students to improve their communicative competence and cultural awareness in the target language. Furthermore, they believed that male characters dominated the Vision series' texts and illustrations and Islamic ideology was dominant in the Vision series. Teachers, students, and ELT administrators, as well as textbook designers and materials creators, may benefit from the results of this study.

In the world of language teaching, textbooks have a central role; therefore, they influence the entire process of learning/teaching languages. Having them analyzed and evaluated is vital for ensuring their efficiency and alignment with the goals of language classes. Reviewing the vision series textbook evaluation studies is the purpose of this paper. Due to the extensive use of this series in Iranian high schools, students' worldviews are inevitably affected by it. Students may also be lead wrongly by biased perspectives in high school textbooks. Since these textbooks are new and taught to every Iranian student, they need continuous evaluation and analysis to achieve their specified goals. While some studies have evaluated and analyzed these textbooks, a review of published articles in this field is still lacking. Throughout the literature, 24 research articles from the last 5 years are discussed. Generally, the study found that most teachers believe Vision text books have adhered to the guidelines of the CLT method and are an improvement over the old English language teaching books. Several revisions have also been suggested because they believe these books have cultural shortcomings and do not allow students to become familiar with the target culture. As a final point, some implications are presented regarding the evaluation of English textbooks in Iranian contexts.