Educational language learning textbooks: A new outlook on materials development

Globalization and cyberspace brought about radical changes in the way people act and live. One of the manifestations of this movement was that English has become the lingua franca in such a way that all people around the globe need to learn it. Learning another language is seemingly an exhilarating but burdensome experience. In this regard, English language teachers are expected to teach the language and textbooks have been designed to achieve this end. However, applied ELT has postulated that textbooks can be written to enhance both language and life qualities such as self-efficacy or intelligence. This new outlook implies that textbooks must be written for different purpose and so we face a large variety of textbooks. For instance, one textbook can be written to enhance intelligence and language proficiency, or another can be developed to boost self-efficacy and language proficiency. With this in mind, in this paper, we intend to outline the major tenets of developing materials for the above-mentioned purpose and provide a tangible example which can throw more light on the concept. Copyright © 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing.