Seameo regional language centre
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| 1.5. Methods of the project
The major methods employed in this project included textbook analysis, teacher survey and textbook author’s interview. For the purpose of textbook analysis, an in-depth evaluation of the three books English 10, English 11, and English 12 and their accompanying workbooks and teacher’s manuals was conducted using the checklists provided by Cunningsworth (1995) with some modifications. Cunningsworth (ibid)’s checklists were adopted among the various available for practical purposes. They seem to be more manageable within the time constraints of the project while still covering the most important evaluation criteria (see Appendix 1 for the modified version). Teacher survey (Appendix 2), on the other hand, enabled to collect teachers’ opinions about the quality as well as practicality of the new textbooks. In designing the survey I was more interested in the diversified opinions and comments from the teachers than being able to quantify the data. Therefore, I used open-ended questions rather than closed questions to allow for as much information to be provided as possible. The survey was written in Vietnamese and included two parts. The first part gathered demographic information about the respondents but carefully allowed for anonymity. The second part consisted of five questions asking the respondents to comment on 17 the strengths and weaknesses of the new textbooks as well as the difficulties they might have experienced in using the books. The respondents of the survey were 250 upper secondary school teachers and teacher trainers working in various provinces and cities throughout the country. Data collection took place during July 2007 at the two annual teacher training workshops organized by MOET in Ho Chi Minh city and Nghe An province. Finally, I also conducted a telephone interview with one of the textbook authors. My purpose in conducting the interview was to understand the author’s underlying philosophy about language teaching and materials development. This information would help to explain my findings in a more objective manner. The interview lasted approximately 30 minutes and I used note-taking techniques to record the information. In what follows, I will present and discuss the major findings (Chapter 2), draw conclusion and propose recommendations for teachers and textbook authors (Chapter 3). |