DESIGNING A “LIFE SKILLS QUESTIONNAIRE” FOR ANALYZING THE SOCIO-CULTURAL CONSTRUCTS OF EFL TEXTBOOKS

Education is not an end, but a means to an end. The ultimate goal of education is to prepare students for their future life. Regarding this fact, English language classes and textbooks can be used as tools for improving learnersʹ life skills. Meanwhile, informative textbooks with rich socio-cultural constructs which foster learnersʹ life skills are needed. To assess the range of the textbooks richness in these aspects, a standard and acceptable questionnaire should be designed to measure and analyze the aforementioned constructs and skills. To this end, 29 clear-sighted professors and scientists of related professions such as sociology, educational sciences, materials development, psychology, etc. were interviewed about life skills. They belonged to 48 percent of Iran provinces and the most important universities. Their suggested life skills were studied and arranged. Finally, the life skills questionnaire presented in the appendix was originated after all these steps and processes. It can be used by educational policy makers, materials developers, researchers, teachers, etc. to examine and analyze the socio-cultural constructs of Iranian textbooks and their amount of agreement with determined life skills in this questionnaire.