Abstract

Education is not an end, but a means to an end. The ultimate goal of education is to prepare students for their future life. Regarding this fact, English language classes and textbooks can be used as tools for improving learners’ life skills. Meanwhile, informative textbooks with rich socio-cultural constructs that foster learners’ life skills are needed. To assess the range of the Iranian EFL textbooks richness in these aspects, a life skills questionnaire was distributed among ELT teachers (N=73) and EFL learners (N=1112) almost all over Iran. The results originated from data analysis showed that Iranian EFL textbooks don’t improve the EFL learners’ essential life skills considerably especially leadership life skills, critical thinking life skills, and decision making/problem solving life skills. The findings of this research and the designed life skills questionnaire can be used by educational policy makers, syllabus designers, materials developers, researchers, teachers, etc. to examine and analyze the socio-cultural constructs of Iranian EFL textbooks for considering in the processes of publishing new EFL textbooks for the Islamic-Iranian society of Iran.

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