The textbook review system in Taiwan can be divided into three parts: primary, secondary, and vocational school. Primary and secondary school textbooks are reviewed by review and approval committees, while vocational school textbook review is carried out without a committee. Although the above committees are responsible for reviewing textbooks, each has its own regulations. Whether decision made by the committees have any administrative binding force is one of the concerns of this paper. Second, what principles should organizing review and approval committees have to carry out the administration obligations of the administrative organization. What roles should the administrative organization play in review and approval committees? This paper analyzes laws and regulations relevant to textbook review. It also compares the organizational operation of committees in education and other fields. Textbook review organization and procedures in Japan are also examined to draw conclusions and suggestions for Taiwan’s textbook review system.

　　Following liberation, regulating the confusing and decentralized textbook market, strictly controlling and unifying teacher’s books used in primary and secondary schools was a top priority for the new political regime. For this purpose, a step by step approach was taken which included issuing textbook catalogs, setting up publishers, and framing a national unified textbook policy. The fact that the highly unified textbooks were an important means to indoctrinating the populace with the national ideology helped ensure the fundamental quality of the textbooks, but the inevitable weakening of curriculum standards and the authority of the syllabus overemphasized the effects of textbooks, making them unsuitable for use with students and localities characterized by diversity. This created a problem with textbooks that the Ministry of Education was unable to resolve for half a century.

　　Textbooks, an essential teaching and learning resource for secondary and elementary schools, help to shape tomorrow’s citizens. The textbooks incorporating both aesthetic features and functional purposes can be used to not only trigger the art of teaching but also conduct a better learning experience. First, this study illustrates the four major significances of the art of teaching of E. W. Eisner. Referring to these four significances and other literature, second, this study proposes five ways to use textbook design to initiate the art of teaching. They are 1) using art to deepen students’ perception ability, 2) employing various symbolic systems to develop students’ multiple intelligence, 3) utilizing aesthetic distance to develop students’ imagination and creativity, 4) using manipulative design to encourage joy and surprise from learning, and 5) using multi–layered, multi–dimensional and blank spaces to provoke emergent ends. Third, this study attempts to integrate the principles of illustration and layout design into textbook design. By employing these principles appropriately, we hope, textbooks become the objects which can promote students’ learning motivation and aesthetic experiences. Finally, referring to the methods proposed to encourage the art of teaching and principles in illustration and layout design, this study examines US and Japanese textbooks to provide positive examples which can make the art of teaching more fascinating.

　　Research in the past has shown that gender semantic cues for personal pronouns are essential for reading comprehension and it can be applied to teaching. Therefore, it is crucial to examine how semantic cues are used in textbooks today. This study analyzes the appropriateness of gender semantic cues for third person pronouns in elementary school level textbooks published by three publishers: Kang-Xuan, Han-Lin, and Nan-Yi. The findings are as follows: (1) All three editions use various names for different genders with clear semantic cues. (2) As for the sequence used when learning pronouns, the character representing the third person pronoun “he” is learned earlier than that for “she.” This sequence is shown in all three textbooks. Lastly, the present study propose listing the character for the female pronoun in the formal vocabulary, putting characters representing pronouns for different genders in the same lesson, and introducing the relationships between pronouns and composition cohesion in a separate small unit. It is recommended that future research focus on the pronoun resolution ability of children in different learning stages and how semantic cues in second person pronouns could influence pronoun resolution.