Characteristics of a good textbook
To make the English textbooks useful for the students and the teachers the following characteristics should be taken into consideration.
Fix the Objective:-
The textbook should aim at teaching the material that has to be taught to the class e.g. If the aim is to teach the pupil to read and Write English then a book which has been written for an aural oral approach would not be suitable.
The adaptations will not help. Even if the students read the dialogues out of the book and copy them a hundred times on paper, but would never be able to learn the correct forms of written English. The teacher should find a book whose objectives match the requirements of the class... Subject Matter to be Presented
The presentation of the subject matter is the most important step in textbook writing Here presentation refers to the communication of knowledge. Mostly, it is the teacher who communicates all the new information to the pupil either directly or indirectly.
It is always helpful for the teacher to make a good presentation if the material in the book is helpful these days the inductive approach is being emphasized to teach grammatical principles i.e. the teacher moves from many particular examples to a few general ideas. Rather than teaching the rules firsthand and then giving illustrations.
The vital aspect which should be checked in evaluating, a textbook for good presentation is contextualization. It is not enough for the author to provide a dozen examples of how a grammatical construction works. But the examples should have some meaning for the students. It is this meaning that allows the pupil to understand the linguistic feature, not vice-versa.
Grading the Structures:-
A good English textbook should emphasize a gradation of structures. The new vocabulary and structural items must be introduced and taught at any cost
Vocabulary: - The vocabulary and constructions are called the linguistic content of the book. There is also information on examining the thematic content of the book. Some themes are always good for the students, and some content is suitable for a particular group. Therefore, it should be seen that both the linguistic and thematic content should be right.
If the linguistic content is poor, the teacher will have to do a great deal of adaptation. He would have to put in proper exercises for the lesson e.g. the grammar part etc. If the thematic content is poor, the students will have to make extra effort to remain interested in the activities of the chapter when the material does not provide the stimulus.
Repetition of New Structures and Vocabulary Items:-
In English language teaching, the new structures and words once presented in interesting situations should be repeated a; number of times afterwards in a variety of situations. These repetitions should be properly spaced to fix the structures and the words firmly in the student's mind.
Illustrations
A good English textbook should have lots of illustrations. These illustrations should be drawn correctly, and relevant to the situations presented in the reading material. A few coloured pages in the book are always appreciated.
Exercises at the End of the Chapter:
At the end of the lesson, the content and the language material of each chapter should be further practised and tested through a variety of interesting and graded exercises. The instructions should be simple for the students to understand. Though it is difficult to evaluate the assignments given in the book every time, a quick discussion or a random selection of questions will also solve the purpose. It is the teacher who has to make his choice, based upon the best evaluation he can carry out, once he commences his teaching of the new lesson.
Achievement of Target:-
The English textbook should clearly state the target to be achieved at the end of the session. It should mention the target of each lesson in terms of phonetics, grammatical and lexical items; These targets to be achieved should be mentioned either in the list of the content given at the beginning of the book or the end. Often these targets are mentioned at the end of each chapter.
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