The Evaluation of the book “English for the Students of Medicine” by New Generation of SAMT through the perception of English and medical professors

Textbook compilation, as an integral part of ESP, plays a key role in meeting students’ needs and interests as well as realizing the objectives of an educational course plan. Compiling a textbook is often viewed as a daunting task by most university teachers who generally pick out a particular book from among a diverse array of available textbooks. However, the particularities of a given educational context have to be considered in order to be sure of introducing the proper textbook for a group of learners, and that has been resulted in textbook evaluation comes in, which was viewed as indispensable component of curriculum development. Textbooks published by SAMT publications have been often the first choice by most ESP teachers in Iran. However, the effectiveness of these textbooks have been seldom evaluated to inform future decisions regarding the choice of content. Thus, the present study aimed at critically evaluating the newly-developed EAP textbook for medical students published by SAMT.

To this end, nine academic staff members of Tabriz university of Medical Sciences, including five English professors and four medical professors were selected through purposive and convenenience sampling. The book under evaluation consisted of 12 units each of which comprised two reading passages along with the following subsections: check up, digest what you read, reading strategy, vocabulary shot, grammar injection, translation and self-ckeck. The evaluation tool drawn on was the checklist developed by Mahmoodi and Ahmadisafa which included three main components, namely descriptive, objective and content evaluation. The first two components of evaluation were carried out by English professors while the last component was done by medical professors. The validity of the checklist was established through qualitative method based on English experts’ opinions while the reliability was calculated by cronbach’s alpha. For the quantitative part of the research, the book and checklist were emailed to the evaluators who returned their evaluations within the specified time. As for the qualitative part, interviews were held with the participants to collect their answers regarding the open-ended questions of the checklist. The content of the interviews were analyzed qualitatively for each item, and the scores given to each item in the objective evaluation were brought into play.

The findings were based on the views of the participants who answered the questions asked through the checklist as well as the interview. The book under evaluation has improved in terms of layout and looked more inviting compared to its previous counterpart. Other distinguishing features of the book were found to be authentic texts, sufficient and coherent exercises. Utilizing novel methods of introducing new words in the book in order to better retention along with getting benefit from inductive teaching of grammar instead of deductive methods were among positive points regarding the new edition of the book (Hill, 2013). In addition, it seems that the authors were fully cognizant of the significance of avoiding national, religious, cultural, or gender bias. Originality of the texts and the coherence between the contents and the assignments was another advantage.However, despite the authors’ belief, the book is general in nature rather than special English due to the topics of reading comprehension texts and new vocabularies which are relatively close to the topics and words mostly observed in general English books. What is more, the topics are not much congruent with ministerial headings for medical ESP courses. Grading criteria of the book lessons could have been more sophisticated in a way that the final lessons enjoy a higher level language in comparison to the first ones (Ellis, 2012; Richards, 2015). As to language skills, today, ignoring listening, speaking, and writing skills together with pronunciation was outdated (Rajabi & Farahian, 2020) and far from theoretical considerations in the field of language teaching and learning. Thus, curriculum developers and authors would rather put a spotlight on the integration of skills. In a nutshell, despite having indisputable merits, this textbook seemed not to be suitable for the target course.

All in all, on the basis of the collective opinions of the experts the book was found to have been significantly improved compared to its predecessors, especially from the point of appearance, the diversity of exercise types and the way of the passages were presented. However, there were also shortcomings highlighted by both teacher groups. The medical teachers judged the texts as too general and remarked that the book failed to fully meet their expections with respect to tapping specialized vocabulary and knowledge. The English experts, on the other hand, criticized the book as too reading based, still falling short of accommodating the other language skills. It is hoped that, the finidings of the present research will be considered in compiling future ESP books tailored to students’ needs, and better meeting today’s requirements.