In primary and secondary school English classrooms，textbooks remain a major source of input and a guidebook for teacher's instruction． Since the English curriculum reform for basic education was put into effect in 2001，many sets of English textbooks have been put into use． However，the findings of the present survey suggest that most teachers of English hold fairly negative view on the textbooks they are using． They complained that these textbooks do not hold students' interest nor do they offer a variety of useful information． Most texts are unrelated and do not finally form a coherent whole． This paper discusses these problems and puts forward three guiding principles concerning material selection for EFL textbook development．