week?

(This activity is when we were told to use the checklist given to us and evaluate a chapter on a textbook. Then, we need to state what trouble we face and then we need to come up with a solution.)

Textbook Evaluation Checklist

Patricia Byrd and Marianne Celce-Murcia

Evaluation of the fit	Yes (a good fit)	Perhaps (an adequate fit)	Probably (a poor fit)	Absolutely not (wrong for curriculum, students, and/or teachers)
Fit between the textbook and the curriculum
Fits curriculum goals		/
Has appropriate linguistic content	/
Has appropriate thematic content	/
Fits the pedagogical and SLA philosophy of the program/course		/
Fit between the textbook and the students
Explanations understandable and useable for students	/
Examples understandable and useable for students	/
Activities appropriate for students	/
Thematic content understandable	/
Fit between the textbook and the teachers
Fits the language skills of our teachers	/
Fits the knowledge based of our teachers	/
Provides explanation that can be used by our teachers	/
Provides examples that can be used and expanded by our teachers	/
Fits the needs and preference	/
Provides in-book or instructor’s manual support for teachers	/
Overall evaluation of the fit of the book for this course in this program
Should the text be selected		/

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.

Reflection
I never did an evaluation on textbook before. I also never use a checklist before so this experience is really a good thing for me especially since I am going to be a teacher in the future. As a pre-service teacher I guess i can say that I need to look more at other checklist as each have their own advantages and disadvantages. I only used one and its not much so definitely I need to get as much knowledge on these checklist because I will have to use them.
After learning about checklist for textbook, I found it interesting that even textbook is in need of a checklist. I always thought that a textbook is perfect to use for all sort of teaching and everything in it is flawless. So finding a checklist for textbook is really suprising and change my way of thinking on textbook.
Like I said I only used one checklist so to improve my knowledge is by knowing what are the purpose of the checklist as one is not entirely the same as the next.