Change in Textbooks, New Horizons in High Schools of Iran A Review of the Research and Studies on PROSPECT series

Nahid Abdollahi¹ Mohammad Mottaghiyan²

1) MA in TEFL from Islamic Azad University
2) MA from Imam Reza University, Mashhad

Publication : 2nd International Conference on Management and Social Science(2icmsconf.com)
Abstract :
Following the rapid change and replacement of English high school textbooks in Iran, a growing concern about issues of methodology, implementation and feedback developed in ELT society. Several conferences and meetings were held, professors, scholars and practitioners sat to scrutinize every obvious and hidden corner of the program. The team of the development and planning accepted the ideas with open arms and even encouraged more debate and discussions. Finally, in an introductory article they uncovered the prominent changes and called it New Horizons in Teaching English in Iran . The current study is trying to have a detailed review of the main contributions of researchers in the field and summarize the paramount conclusions on the newly developed English for Schools Series: PROSPECT The review of articles uncovers some of the issues to be considered as the leading directions in developing more textbooks of the series and possible adaptations in the current published volumes. The findings of this review study assures us that the change of textbooks has been accepted warmly by the society of English high school teachers and that they are content with the new communicative approach of the series. Although there are some shortcomings that could be accounted as insufficient devoted weekly time, lack of suitable instruction for teachers, ignoring intercultural competence, weak integration of skills and ambiguities for evaluation process.
Keywords : high school textbooks teaching method English teachers