Research on textbooks: the state of the art

Abstract

The textbook is one of the most used resources for teaching languages, especially English. Its advantages and disadvantages are discussed among authors such as Allwright (1981), Ur (1996), Richards (2002), Harmer (2001, 2007) e Hall (2011). Due to the textbook’s importance and comprehensiveness, this bibliographic review aims at mapping topics of academic publications about textbooks, presenting the results of a systematic search for national articles, from journals classified as Qualis A1 and A2 of the Languages/Linguistics area, and international articles from Portal de Periódicos CAPES/MEC. These publications were classified in the categories Analysis, Evaluation and Choice, Design, PNLD, Use, and Other Topics. For the national journals, the words for the search were livro didático and material didático (both in Portuguese), and their plural forms. For the international journals, the words textbook and coursebook, and their plurals, were used. Out of the 531 articles found about textbooks, 322 (61%) analyze the material, 11 (2%) are about evaluation and choice, 11 (2%) are about design, 6 (1%) are about the PNLD, 158 (30%) were classified as other topics, and only 23 (4%) discuss the use of textbooks in the classroom as their main topic, from which only 5 (0.9%) use observation/recording of language classes as methodological procedures. These results show that the use of textbooks is little researched and reinforce the importance of studying the textbook in its context of use, in order to help teachers reflect on their practices and use the material more critically.