This research attempts to investigate the students’ perception of the English textbooks. Based on need analysis, this study recognises the students’ needs and then investigates how far the textbook help in satisfy these needs.
The study includes three parts. The literature review, the research methodology, and the empirical work. In the first part, existing literature related to need analysis is reviewed. Also, a detailed chapter of English in Saudi Arabia is presented. The second part concerns the research methodology. It presents a detailed discussion of the sample, questionnaire design, piloting, and validity analysis. The third part focuses on revealing the results of the empirical work and drawing informed conclusion about the research findings.
The main results of the research indicated that a large number of students use English outside the classroom. Also, the most important reasons to study English were ‘to pass the final exam’, ‘English maybe useful in the future’, and ‘to enter a scientific college at the tertiary level’. Moreover, speaking was found to be the most significant skill needed to accomplish most of the reasons for studying English. Also, students think that the textbooks (EFSA) were not very helpful in developing their speaking skill. This result pays attention to the gap between the objective of the textbook and the actual emphasis of the teaching. This gap was a reason of the mismatch between the examination system and the textbooks focus. However, the results showed that there is more than half of the students who think that the textbook needs some changes. Accordingly, these results showed the importance of needs analysis procedure as a tool of textbook development.