Abstract: While the new round of curriculum reform aims at the development of students' key competencies, the challenge is how to change teachers' rigidly unidirectional use of textbooks (following in most cases), so as to meet students' diversified and personalized learning needs. The inter-relationship between teachers and textbooks is defined based on two dimensions:teachers' satisfaction with textbook design and teachers' fidelity in textbook use. In this study, 1 279 mathematic teachers from Chinese mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong SAR were surveyed to investigate teachers' general inter-relationship with textbooks. The results presented three patterns of relationship. For mainland teachers, even though the textbooks fail to meet students' learning needs, they still choose to follow the books. On the other hand, Hong Kong teachers choose to adapt, supplement or even reject textbook content to create their own teaching materials. Finally, Taiwan teachers are satisfied with the quality of their textbooks, therefore they feel there is no need to adjust the textbooks.

Key words: textbook use, teachers, curriculum implementation