an evaluation of speakout pre-intermediate course book

Nowadays, instructional materials evaluation is one of the heated issues in elt. as a result, the present research sought to do a critical evaluation of the course book of “speakout” based on the iranian efl teachers’ and learners’ ideas. the present study focused on two groups of participants, a total of 50 english language teachers and a group of 50 efl intermediate learners, selected through convenience sampling. to collect data, a checklist (razmajoo, 2010) and a questionnaire (karimi and biria, 2016) were used. using descriptive statistics, the results revealed that this book has some strengths: completeness and appropriateness of presentation (pronunciation), correspondence between students’ levels and the new words load, repetition of the new vocabulary in subsequent lessons for reinforcement and gradually increasing of structure complexity to suit the growing reading ability of the students. this study, however, revealed the weaknesses are unsystematic gradation of vocabulary from simple to complex items, inappropriateness of the number of grammatical points as well as their sequence, incomplete and inadequate practice of idioms, lack of introducing linguistic items in meaningful situations to facilitate understanding, not involving vocabulary and structures which build up the learner’s repertoire. the results also have some implications for materials developers.