ELT Materials in Iran: An Extensive Evaluation of American Headway

In Iranian EFL contexts, widely published materials are not used officially in public schools rather, they are utilized informally in language institutions and private colleges. The insufficiency and shortage of the pedagogical values of school textbooks have been proved by many researches. However, the universally published textbooks which are broadly utilized in informal contexts in our country have not gone under a close scrutiny yet. This study intends to evaluate American Headway series, one of the textbooks taught in over 140 countries throughout the world including Iran. The study is theoretically based on Littlejohn¿s detailed framework (1998). The framework is one of the more objective and less impressionistic frameworks which seeks to evaluate materials as they are regardless of how they are utilized in ELT classrooms.