Job Discussion Forums

[LongShiKong]

Does anyone else get the sense these 3 worlds are largely independent of one another: ELT publishing, academia, and teachers?

Perhaps, it's because I've mostly taught here in China... under limited supervision... often with inferior coursebooks... with newbies that usually have less training than I with my 100 hr TESOL (even Pearson-owned Longman Schools provided appalling little in the way of prof dev)... or the fact I haven't had access to or read a lot of theory.

But I've always felt there's something far more fundamentally flawed with this profession, if you can even call it that!

Then last month's Apple education announcement clinched it for me. The problem, as I see it rests with the very nature of the education publishing industry. We all know they exist to produce texts of fact-based knowledge and exercises intended for individual study. But current trends in public education stress community-based, hands-on, experiential learning rather than individual learning.

As I'd experienced in a grade 4 recently, texts are for the most part, shelved. When you think about it, learning had always been a communal activity until the Industrial Revolution institutionalized learning via the textbook and public school teachers to preach from it.

ELT publishers are no different. They largely ignore the needs of language learners--not because they don't consult with academics, but because they're in the business of publishing volumes of passive language knowledge when what's always been needed is interactive tools. How many student workbooks contain word-search puzzles, or cloze exercises of limited value to the student trying to improve their fluency or accuracy? Have academics even studied the merit of such time-wasters?

Take electronic dictionaries for example, around since the '80s. Publishers license content to manufacturers who generally have even less understanding of the needs of the language learner. So, instead of allowing full manipulation of the content as one could do with a conventional database, (sorting by category, frequency, part of speech, previously looked up, etc, etc), such data is still largely restricted to alphabetic ordering, no different than the printed version.

[golsa]

[spiral78]

I think that a part of the gap is that publishers want as wide an audience as possible, and learners really need tasks and materials that are focused on their specific context.

This by definition means that everything in a book, from themes to functions to task type, is all generic to a very high degree - and decided upon with zero knowledge of or reference to any particular group of learners.

When I've been forced to use textbooks (as a curriculum designer, I avoid whenever possible), it's challenging to justify many of the tasks and goals in most books to my students. The materials and tasks always need editing and supplementation to fit the context. In short, textbooks can be as much work as they are time-savers.

If publishers could/would focus more tightly on different market segments (eg: German native adult professionals working in finance and accounting, with English at the B1-B2 level), the books would be far more useful. The writers could then take into account factors starting from learning culture (does this group of students feel comfortable taking control of their learning or are they more reliant upon teacher and book to lead them?) to interests and needs - and research in the field could be far better applied.

It seems economically feasible to narrow the markets for any particular book in this way to me; perhaps there simply isn't a will to take advantage of it (or maybe it hasn't really occurred to the major publishers that this would be far more interesting, useful, and effective) .

[Phil_K]

I've always found textbooks more of a hindrance than a help, and was never able to design an effective class without additional materials. Normally, learning English (or any language) is about what is actually needed in the moment, and no amount of grammar-studying and irrelevant articles is going to provide that - at least not in a reasonable time-frame. The only justification for me is for the lazy teacher who can't be bothered to prepare his class and just wants to run down the time until payday. Most students soon see throught that!

[EFLeducator]

[Teacher in Rome]

[fluffyhamster]

The elephant in the room (certainly in monolingual settings such as in China) is always the students' first language. If students invested in quality books (and I'm sure there are at least a few available in whichever country) that actually included judicious explanation in L1 with truly adequate exemplification in L2, they could be up to speed a lot quicker, and then merely needing genuine interaction with native or advanced speakers of the language to help cement what's been learnt (and of course to learn more besides).

But for some reason (and it's a natural enough mistake to make), lower-level learners especially believe that having access to a(n often inexperienced though somehow "qualified") native speaker sooner rather than later will be of such great help with more than just pronunciation (and which EFL course includes even a thorough grounding in pronunciation and orthography nowadays!), so they invest quite indefensible amounts of money on classes and glossy books that reduce everything down to such manageable proportions (and usually never more than that - that inexperienced teacher again!) that learning slows rather than accelerates (compared to the "harder", less appealing self-study route).

And obviously the language schools and teachers aren't going to direct these prospective students to good self-study resources with a cheerful 'And maybe, but only maybe, come back later, if you haven't quite been able to get, or still feel you need, some extra practice in conversing' (even though "conversing" - 'You students now talk amongst yourselves while I sit back and monitor you, and get all huffity when you dare to break into L1 out of pure necessity' - is pretty much all that most schools insist upon and do even at the lower levels).

[Glenski]

[LongShiKong]

[fluffyhamster]

[LongShiKong]

[fluffyhamster]

I'm not sure that book translators have such 'limited L2 ability' (their English is probably a darn sight better than most native English teachers' Chinese!), but sure, high school tests and the like can be pretty dodgy. Unfortunately that isn't the ELT publisher's domain/jurisdiction though (not that I think the average ELT textbook would provide many answers, as others and I have said above).

[LongShiKong]

[Denim-Maniac]

In terms of general English, I dont think course books are a bad thing at all, and I actually quite like using them. I dont really care if its Asian specific or not TBH. (Im in China now, and often teach using Face2Face). Sure, some of the topics are very Euro-centric, and whilst that isnt ideal, its the actual skills used/presented that tends to trump a topic IMO.


I wish there was a similar publishing industry built around learning other lanuages, specifically Chinese, as I havent yet found any learning source for China that comes anywhere near matching the material I teach English with.

I dont feel publishing and teaching are so far about...but academia often seems to be. I think this is true of many fields versus their academic counterparts.

[Glenski]