Textbook Evaluation Checklist
Patricia Byrd and Marianne Celce-Murcia
Evaluation of the fit
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Yes
(a good fit)
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Perhaps
(an adequate fit)
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Probably
(a poor fit)
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Absolutely not (wrong for curriculum, students, and/or teachers)
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Fit between the textbook and the curriculum
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Fits curriculum goals
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Has appropriate linguistic content
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Has appropriate thematic content
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Fits the pedagogical and SLA philosophy of the program/course
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Fit between the textbook and the students
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Explanations understandable and useable for students
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Examples understandable and useable for students
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Activities appropriate for students
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Thematic content understandable
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Fit between the textbook and the teachers
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Fits the language skills of our teachers
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Fits the knowledge based of our teachers
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Provides explanation that can be used by our teachers
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Provides examples that can be used and expanded by our teachers
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Fits the needs and preference
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Provides in-book or instructor’s manual support for teachers
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Overall evaluation of the fit of the book for this course in this program
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Should the text be selected
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In our opinion, this checklist, by Byrd, is not appropriate for an in-depth chapter/textbook evaluation. Looking at this the holistic view, we can see that this checklist seems to be a good evaluation at first but after viewing this checklist analytically, we deduced that this checklist is suitable for the overview of the textbook/chapter. In lay man’s term, this checklist just focuses on whether the textbook/chapter meets the need of the students, teachers and the curriculum, as a whole.
A full analysis of the textbook/chapter is hard to be done because the checklist is too simple and a bit vague. Furthermore, this checklist does not include the micro-evaluation stage that is crucial, even though it contains the macro-evaluation stage.
Our suggestions would be to use this checklist as the overview evaluation and then complemented by another checklist that involves a more in-depth evaluation. Then we can consider the evaluation is good.
