The case for the prosecution starts with exhibit A, Intelligent Business, the newish series of textbooks from Longman.
First, a mea culpa. At first glance Intelligent Business seemed like such a good concept that I recommended it to my school-a business series where the bits about marketing that are useless for accountants are left to another book where the teaching of business concepts are implicit for once,leaving the separate series of skills books to deal with the nitty gritty of telephoning etc.
Good concepts don’t cost publishers money, however, and the rest of the process was obviously done on the cheap- cheap production values, obvious skimping on proof reading and classroom testing, filling of page space with waffle and instructions etc etc.
And cost (and corner) cutting is not the only example of economics at play here- we also have The Economist magazine tie in, The Economist magazine being owned by Pearson, who also own the ELT publisher…(I’m sure you can guess). And then there is the classic having it both ways of designing it clearly for a market niche and then hiding that fact in the hope that people it is less suitable for will buy it and so make it a bestseller.Either I’m turning into the grumpy old man of TEFL well before my time or there really was a halcyon time when the evil magic of the ELT publishers’ marketing departments was not so strong.
I’m not suggesting that the advent of real market forces in ELT publishing in the UK has entirely been a bad thing. The publishers have at least started producing materials suitable for the budgets and abilities of real schools, teachers and students. One good example of this is the Oxford Basics series, where we can perhaps forgive the proofreading and other basic errors pointed out in a recent MET review because the budgetary restraints that probably caused those problems seem to have resulted in a book that is much more accessible for the real world than the stuff the big boys produced until a few years ago.
So, no real answer to my question so far I’m afraid, but at least that proves that the post title was a real question and not a lead in to a slagging off I guess… We can all see if things get a bit clearer in Part Two, in which I will list things that have got better and worse over the last few years.