How the future of textbooks has to be
New article of mine on www.developingteachers.com
How the future of textbooks has to be
Looking back on my 12 years of teaching English, if it is not just old age speaking I could swear that the first couple of years after I did my initial certificate (CELTA) were a golden age for EFL textbooks. It’s not that they made your lessons any easier or taught the learners the language any better than the textbooks coming out now, but there was just a feeling in the air that books like Cutting Edge and Innovations were the beginning of a new wave of books that was going to fundamentally change the way we teach forever. You could call that period the Modernist Age of Textbooks.
But modernism leads inevitably, it seems, to post-modernism. Since those optimistic days the ELT publishing industry seems to have given up that radical mission as if changing the world was just a hippy dream. Not that the world of textbooks has entirely stood still, but even the most different-looking of the new bunch (e.g. Natural English) only concentrate on what we should teach rather than how we should teach it- which is strange, because the conclusions that lead people to look for new ways to teach have been backed up by more and more research and have gone from controversial to commonly accepted during that time.
The three most fundamental parts of our newly certain knowledge are:
-What we teach is not the same as what students learn
-There is a long delay and many stages between coming across the language for the first time and mastering it
-People learn differently and so learn different things at different speeds
Until a textbook deals with the points above (and I have yet to see a teacher’s book that even mentions all three in full), whether we teach more natural English, more collocations, more international English etc. is not really a question I can get excited about. The question is how we teach any of these points.
Below are my initial ideas on how to create a textbook that takes the three factors above into account…
Read the rest of the article here and maybe another interesting article about teaching in Japan here, and then comment here:
August 10th, 2007 at 6:15 am
Great article…I’m going to collect my thoughts more and post something more specific on my blog, but for now: good point about the usual style of testing provided by many books being opposite to what the book purports to be all about.
And hey, I’ll agree with any plan that demotes there is / there are!
August 10th, 2007 at 8:56 am
Look forward to reading it. Trying to start some kind of campaign here, so the more coverage and comments the better!
August 13th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
Just finished reading this. There is an awful lot I agree with here. I had planned to reply earlier. Some very good thoughts. I just disagree on the testing but purely on the basis that I am resigned to the fact that book writers will never get that element right and that it is up to educational institutions/teachers to resolve that to their own satisfaction. I’ve posted something on my own blog on the article.
August 13th, 2007 at 9:34 pm
Alrighty, here you go: http://www.tefllogue.com/about-tefl/from-tefltastic-how-the-future-of-textbooks-has-to-be.html
August 14th, 2007 at 1:30 am
Thanks for including this on your blogs, guys. As I say in the article, I think someone else will come up with a better idea with what a futuristic TEFL textbook could be, but we need to prepare the industry for that. I guess that makes me the John the Baptist of future textbooks…
August 14th, 2007 at 4:56 am
[...] From TEFLLogue Katie comments on and points to a post that I’ll be setting aside time to read: How the future of textbooks has to be [...]
August 17th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
From the research, it doesn’t seem students have much success in accessing the grammar rules they have been taught and turning them into accurate communication.
Just look at personal pronouns of gender. In a 20-minute lesson a teacher can explain how “he” and “she” works. But you will find students still making mistakes with this for several years.
It must be one of the simplest grammar rules that can be taught. It is very simple to understand. Yet, when students are communicating they have trouble accessing those rules that would enable them to avoid the mistake.
So from my reading of the research it seems that students must assimilate the language through a lot of exposure to it. We actually learn things that were not taught to us.
Let’s look at your first sentence:
“Looking back on my 12 years of teaching English, if it is not just old age speaking I could swear that the first couple of years after I did my initial certificate (CELTA) were a golden age for EFL textbooks.”
Looking back on my
I could swear
golden age
These three examples of language above and other idioms and phrases that we know are things that were not taught to us. I doubt any teacher gave students lessons on how to say “Looking back” yet it is a natural part of our language. It is also doubtful that we actually taught ourselves these things, that we said, “Hmm, I like this ‘looking back’ thing I just read in this book and I need to remember to use it sometime.”
So we can see that students can learn a lot that is not taught yet take years to learn what is taught.
INSIGHTS-INTO-TEFL.blogspot.com, DAVEKEES.blogspot.com
August 20th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
Thanks for the comments Dave. You are quite right that students pick up language we never teach. This was the hole in the justification for the Natural English textbooks, which taught the language Upper Int students use and Int students don’t to get the Int students up to the next level. However, those Upper students obviously didn’t have Natural English textbooks to use and so had picked those things up without any instruction, so why the need to suddenly start teaching those points??
The research does seem to suggest that forms that are consciously noticed, pointed out, corrected, practiced etc. are picked up quicker and retained longer than those that are just read or heard totally subconsciously. The difficulty starts when the number of forms we try to have consciously noticed to include, for example, collocations as well as grammar means that each of those points does not get enough time and attention to make that noticing worthwhile. Hence the present trend to have textbooks cover the little “usually missed out” bits of language we have learnt about studying spoken grammar etc. is counter productive.
August 21st, 2007 at 1:04 pm
Some comments by email from a regular TEFL.net reviewer, Paula Swenson, that she said I could share:
“I’ve yet to meet a textbook I really love, they’re sort of like politicians . .. you find yourself picking the lesser of the evils . . . as to objections you cited folks might have, well . . . the learning process is already unpredictable, so I don’t think that’s valid nor fair. I suspect the more likely objection, if people are honest, is that it makes lesson planning unpredictable! However I have my own set of pet theories on that one: 1) people who want their lesson planning to be absolutely predictable aren’t very concerned about the students learning curve; 2) we all benefit from having our assumptions shaken up regularly; and 3) all TEFL teachers (and maybe all teachers, full stop) should be trained in Improv! (let me know if you’d like to talk about that one some more)
I think the best argument you make in all of this (aside from the obvious ‘this is how native speakers learn language’) has to do with mixed levels and mixed abilities, which is, of course, what 98 % of classes truly are if we’re honest about it. There is no one size fits all thing we can do, but here sure are ways to be flexible and give more clients more of what they want.”