Abstract:

In the Slovak educational context, the EFL coursebook maintains the status of an essential component for instruction and language learning. The lack of national coursebooks forces teachers to select an appropriate teaching/learning material from a plethora of EFL coursebooks currently offered on the market.

To ensure the suitability of coursebooks to learners’ needs and conditions of the Slovak classrooms, it is important to conduct an evaluation. The research on textbook evaluation suggests several methods, such as the impressionistic method, checklist method, or an in-depth method. For the purposes of our paper, the evaluative checklist has been chosen as the target matter of study.

The article aims to present an overview of EFL textbook evaluation checklists as employed in contemporary studies in the ELT context. The meta-analytical review is followed by a further analysis of presented checklists focusing on identifying and introducing checklists’ core criteria by comparing the checklists employed in selected studies. The similarities discovered by comparison represent the core criteria list which can serve as a base for constructing one’s own textbook evaluation checklist or questionnaire.

Keywords:

Textbook evaluation, EFL, evaluative checklists, meta-analysis, core criteria.