Design and Application of a ‘Textbook Visual Effects’ Evaluation Checklist

Textbook evaluation is a well-known area of instructional material development. Different studies have attempted, so far, to provide criteria for rating the efficiency of textbooks designed for academic purposes. Among different features of textbooks which have been studied, little attention was paid to the visual aspects of the designed materials. In this paper, we attempted to highlight the value of textbook visualization from several related perspectives and then to design a categorized checklist which specifically focused on the visual aspects. This checklist was later used to compare and contrast EFL textbooks taught at Iran's public schools and those taught at private language institutes. The results of this research not only revealed the areas of difference between the two groups, but also elucidated the subtle weak or strong points among the representative sample books of each group. The more significant application of this research, however, was to provide an evaluative tool of the visual effects which can at best be used by textbook compilers, designers and illustrators in their design of new textbooks or edition of the existing materials widely used either at national or international level.