STUDENT SUITABILITY PERSPECTIVE OF THE ENGLISH TEXTBOOK 'GET ALONG WITH ENGLISH’ FOR VOCATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL sTUDENTS GRADE XII

Abstract

Due to their important roles in ELT, textbooks should suit not only the curriculum and teachers but also the students. The reason why and how the students learn English will determine their choice of textbooks. Therefore, this study deals with the students' suitability perspective of an English textbook ‘Get Along with English' for Vocational Schools Grade XII. This is primarily aimed to evaluate the whether it meets the intellectual and personal needs of students the textbook’s general attributes and the language aspects employment. The research data were collected by distributing a survey questionnaire to elicit the perspective of 100 students of Sekolah Usaha Perikanan Menengah (SUPM) Tegal as the current users. A complementary questionnaire and an unstructured interview were also taken involving 10 teachers of Vocational High Schools in Tegal regency. The questionnaires had beendistributed by some modifications from the checklist of evaluation criteria by Mukundan et al. (2011) following the textbook evaluation theory of Grant (1989) and Cunningsworth (1995). The findings revealed that the textbook satisfied the majority of students in most criteria. Meanwhile, the results also showed that the textbook has weak points in the case of physical durability, phonological aspects insufficiency, and the lack of its fun activities to attract students’ interest. A further investigation focuses on analysing the relation of language aspects, the students’ motivation, and the learning achievments is suggested.