Developning and Evaluationg a General English Coursebook for University Students of German with a Focus on Reading Skill

Subject Areas : Language Materials Development

Leila Rahmani ¹ , Kourosh Akef ² , Mehrdad Rezaee ³

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Received: 2024-11-11 Accepted : 2025-03-11 Published : 2025-03-16

Keywords: coursebooks, German students, material development, material evaluation, multilinguals, reading skill,

Abstract :

Learning new languages has always been one of the most challenging issues for learners. This deals with learning a third language specifically, in this study, for German university students who improve their reading skill. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the coursebook of the Persian university students of  German language, who study German and learn English as their third language. To that end, a new English coursebook was developed based on the models of needs analysis and theoretical frameworks of the language materials evaluation. The method used in this study was an exploratory mixed method, which had two qualitative and quantitative phases. For this purpose, the researchers divided a group of 62 Iranian participants into the control and the experimental groups. The participants in both groups were given a questionnaire to do a needs analysis. The students and their professor were interviewed, via a semi-structured interview to get their needs, expectations, and points of view regarding improving reading skills, needed to evaluate and develop the new language material. In the control group, the students of German were taught English reading skills with the usual material. In contrast, the experimental group received the newly designed language material. Then, the data from both phases (i.e., qualitative and quantitative) were analyzed. The results revealed the inadequacy of the previous coursebook (e.g., irrelevant texts to the interests and needs of the learners, poor exercises, etc.) and the effectiveness of the newly developed language material in reading skill improvement. The results of this research may be helpful to empower those English teachers, who teach bilingual or multilingual students, German language teachers, language material developers, syllabus designers, second language learners, language schools, and language policymakers to develop new language materials for special groups of students based on their needs.

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