Evaluating White Space of a Malaysian Secondary ELT Textbook

Abstract

Students are believed to learn at optimum level with materials with a lot of white space since the existence of vast number of words and limited amount of whitespace, especially in textbooks may contribute to the increase in anxiety among learners (Tomlinson, 1998). This study evaluates the amount of white space in terms of pixels in the Malaysian KBSM Form 2 English textbook using MATLAB 7.5. The findings reveal the inadequacy of white space in terms of pixels in our local textbooks. Not many pages have the percentage of white space exceeding 90 percent which is believed to be the ideal on a page. Hence, this method of evaluation can aid textbooks writers or evaluators to create textbooks that are less threatening so that learning a language with textbooks might just be productive to both learners and educators.