Evaluation of English Textbooks in Terms of Textuality Standards

Abstract

Putting a number of sentences together in order to build a text, the sentences must comply with the criteria such as cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, contextualization, informativeness and intertextuality. The text should bear these criteria in order to fulfil the intended communicative features. Therefore, in this study, it is aimed to develop "The Text Evaluation Rubric" and to evaluate the texts in the 9th grade English textbooks by means of this rubric. For this purpose, relevant literature has been searched and a rubric with seven dimensions and including textuality criteria has been prepared. To ensure the content validity of the rubric, experts have been consulted. The weighted Kappa Coefficient was examined for reliability. In terms of dimensions of the rubric, the reliability value of Cohesion dimension is .596; that of Coherence dimension is .917; that of Intentionality is .882; that of Acceptability is .851; that of Contextualization is .948; that of Informativeness is .875 and that of Intertextuality is .880. Moreover, the validity of rubric is provided by inspection of content, structure and extent. These results show that "The Text Evaluation Rubric" developed to evaluate the texts is a reliable and valid rubric. This rubric can be an alternative tool to evaluate the texts being in high school English textbooks.