Textbook evaluation from the perspective of students and language teachers

Abstract

Foreign language knowledge is a more and more important individual competence in everyday life. One of its development opportunities is the obligatory foreign language learning in public education institutions, for which many tools can be used, the most common and widespread being textbooks and their workbooks. They can be analysed from several points of view – we present the results of impact-oriented textbook research (Weinbrenner, 1992) in our present paper: the textbook evaluation of students and teachers. What do they think about their textbooks, what kinds of effects the textbooks have? In our paper, we analyse the student (890 people) and teacher (N=43 German as foreign language teachers, N=57 English as foreign language teachers) database of „Learning and teaching German in Hajdú-Bihar and Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg counties (2018-2019)”. In this database we included those students’ data, who learned German and/or English in the 11th grade of secondary grammar or technical school in the 2018/2019 school year, as well as their language teachers’ data. We analysed the data with SPSS program. According to our results, there are differences between the schoolbook evaluation of different students’ groups with different future plans, as well as by maintainers, training type, and foreign language learned. Students evaluate their textbooks lower than their teachers, but the students’ averages are higher than what their teachers assume.