Right Book, Right Learners? Textbook-Cohort Fit and Cognitive Load in a CEFR-Aligned Saudi University EFL Course: A Case Study

The alignment between textbook demands and learner proficiency in a CEFR A1–A2 General English course (Eng. 05225) was examined for Psychology students at a Saudi public university, using Evolve Special Edition7, focusing specifically on textbook suitability, learner struggle, and cognitive load across the four language skills. Document analysis of 23 curriculum artefacts and structured interviews with five teachers and 16 students, from across the proficiency levels, were qualitatively triangulated to support identification of the five key elements raised by the students and teachers of this study. The Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) was adopted to analyse the impact of the instructional design of the textbook on the learners’ process, and the intercoder agreement was near perfect (Cohen’s κ = .74–.81). Several misalignments were observed, often between the competence required for textbook tasks and the competence level of the learners (intrinsic load); the rubric used for the assessment process is centrally based, whereas the designs and demands from the textbook are communicative; and the learners adopt coping methods that can include memorisation, copying structural templates, syntactic simplification without increasing germane processing in the textbook task. The writing rubric can be described as an accuracy gate since most B1-level communicative risk-takers do not exhibit the linguistic level required for A1–A2. The study contributes to the concept of textbook–cohort fit as a part of “constructive alignment”, extends the concept of CLT to the centralised EFL assessment, and introduces a four-layer model of curriculum; it suggests contextualised standardisation through proficiency-based textbook selection and adaptable departmental rubrics.