An ideal textbook should provide learners with knowledge, language skills and information about English speaking countries, preparing them to interact with people from foreign countries of different backgrounds.

A good textbook does all the tough and tedious job a teacher would normally do in terms of lesson planning or designing specific extra teaching materials.

Top quality textbooks have to be written and designed by native-speaker teachers and published in English-speaking countries.

No effective or successful class can be taught without a textbook which is the only source of practical and firm guidance to the teacher.

Cultural bias found in books published abroad pose a minor problem and teachers should not turn their attention to ideological issues but to focus exclusively on more pressing problems of language.

The areas teachers should focus on are spelling and pronunciation.

Teachers should avoid correcting students when they are engaged in a conversation or dialogue because the flow of ideas is disrupted.

In terms of speaking, features such as coherence, organization and development of ideas should not be part of the correcting process.

Every single error, serious or small, must be detected and corrected on the spot.

Teachers should identify students’ mistakes and make them practice those mistakes.

Conversation skills are structured in a gradual progression and are organized around question-and-answer exchanges between teachers and students in small intensive classes.

Structural patterns are taught with the use of repetitive drills.

Little attention is paid to the context of texts, which are treated as exercises in grammatical analysis.

New teaching points are taught through modelling and practice.

Teaching materials consist basically of tapes, language labs, and visual aids.

There is much vocabulary and it is dealt with in the form of lists of isolated words.

Students are provided with instructions only in the target language.

Excessive reliance on mimicry, memorization of set phrases, and overlearning.

Close, deliberate cognitive attention is paid to the rules, paradigms, intricacies, and exceptions of the language.

Little or scarcely any grammatical explanation is provided; grammar is taught by inductive analogy.

Interlanguage shares far more elements of the learner’s foreign language than those of his or her mother tongue.

Two of the main factors that contribute for interlanguage are overgeneralization and language transfer.

Different learners create the same kind of interlanguage.

The learner’s linguistic background and personal experiences are irrelevante to the shaping of his or her interlanguage.

Interlanguage creates a set of fixed rules to help the learner build a bridge between his or her first language and the second or foreign language.