Job Discussion Forums

[Tudor]

As we have a thread for our favourite EFL books, how about our worst books? Are there any books that you use or have used that you particularly dislike and why? I'm sure most of us have sat in a classroom wondering if the author of a particular book has ever actually been in a classroom.

Let me start the ball rolling with Business One to One, an OUP coursebook aimed at, well, one to one teaching. I just think it's awful from its irritating and illogical layout spread out over two pages to its completely pointless and tedious exercises. I can't give specific examples as I haven't used it for some time, but it's one to avoid at all costs IMHO!

Over to you...

[spiral78]

The old version of Headway Pre-Int - pre 2002. It featured (among other horrors) a transcript of Mohammed Ali speaking at some event, claiming that the phrase 'they ain't gonna help us' was an example of 'American English.'

Oh, yea, and something called 'Independent Writing' by a couple of Virginia, US authors. The book was anything but independent; it highlighted 'following the steps' ad nauseum, and gave detailed instructions to the teacher right in the book 'break the class into pairs and have them practice until they understand clearly' or 'have the students copy the rules onto the board 100 times' (OK, I made that one up!).

It was meant to be an academic writing guidebook, but it went on about reported speech for quite a few pages (not a grammatical function commonly found in most academic writing ' and then she said,.....' ).

It also featured quite a few references to US icons such as McDonalds, and - worst - had a George Will article that was critical of about six different European cultures. This did not go over too well with our European students .

I contributed to the decision to burn this one

[geaaronson]

There is a publishing company out of Mexico City, DCM I believe, that puts out a small vocabulary primer, APPRENDER INGLES SIN MAESTRO, that had several mistakes on every page in its first edition. It put out a second edition with about 20 mistakes still throughout the book.

They also put out a coloring book formatted book that is also studded with line drawings with many spelling and vocab mistakes. So be weary of any of their books. I`ve seen their books both at book fairs and at the best of the EFL bookstores in DF.

[johntpartee]

How do you rate degrees of badness? I've yet to see any EFL book that didn't have errors, either spelling or grammatical. All that aside, though, most of them are just plain BAD.

[jpvanderwerf2001]

The old black-and-white English First books were simply awful. I think they just threw everything (and I mean everything) in them so people who couldn't plan lessons would never run out of material. I used 5% of the material in those books...at most.
I think the old Headway series was rather poor, too.

[Sashadroogie]

Worst course books? Very subjective, of course. One series I can't stand is Market Leader. Very over-rated, mainly on account of there being no real competition to challenge it. Puts me to sleep every time.

[johntpartee]

[Sashadroogie]

Don't blame you, JohnTpartee.

Clockwise is another faff-filled waste of paper. Hate, hate, hate!

[2 over lee]

English for Meetings, Oxford Express series...vapid

[LongShiKong]

[geaaronson]

Hey, guys, could be worse. I lasted two months in a preparatoria abierto in DF that had at least 6 text books for each class. I never understood why until I had a conversation with a former colleague from that school who gave me the inside dope. Of course, both the school`s director and head of the English department were getting their kickbacks.

[Prof.Gringo]

One of the treasures of my EFL book collection is a book, about 100 years old and aimed at teaching ESL to immigrants to the US.

I do remember that the 1st chapter shows a ship and explains that every immigrant to the US had travelled by steam ship to reach the US and that the objects found on-board a ship should thus all be familiar to immigrants.

[fluffyhamster]

Luckily I've not had to use too many textbooks, and the ones that I did generally weren't too bad. The problem is in thinking that any textbook is necessarily going to be that good (unless it's the bare-bones essentials, something like Side by Side, say), when what a teacher ought be doing is taking whatever language items are in the syllabus (or more likely, just in the book's contents) and really personalizing them in terms of their and then their students' experiences, recent and/or memorable events, local knowledge etc.

There are however certain books that really stuck in my mind due to them being so awful, or mismatched to my teaching approach. The awful was a Japanese high school English textbook that taught of all things a rising tag in the following context: It's a beautiful day, isn't it?. Granted, not exactly an EFL book available outside of Japan, but a similar grade of toilet paper can be found in public schools the world over, for those foreigners lucky enough to teach in them LOL. The mismatched meanwhile was H.Palmer's (dated) driller-killer How to Think in English, which contained beauties to outdo even the most unimaginative exponents (yes, even those in Ur's Grammar Practice Activities, which is otherwise a reasonably useful book), such as Is it better to cut butter with a knife or with a spoon? (The so-called communicative conversation school I was working at then, again in Japan, honestly expected me to use this book for the first 15-20 minutes of every lower-level class. The occasional strange sentence I can handle, but I've never been the sort of teacher who can drone on with pages of them with scant disregard of functional utility (that is, I don't see how the grammar can be mastered if the context is [too] skewy - grammar and context are, or certainly ought to be seen as, interdependent, so inventing completely crazy sentences as if completely off [the top of] one's head in order to master [just] the "grammar" is largely pointless IMHO)).

[stevie76]

The Success series for teenagers is genuinely wretched. I can't open it without wanting to throttle the authors. The worst thing about it is that the writers clearly thought they had their fingers on the teen pulse. I'm sorry for my teenage classes, even they don't deserve it!

[Sashadroogie]

They probably did - for the week before publication. The trouble with teen books is they date so fast. In fact, datedness aside, show me a book that any teen likes. Almost impossible to produce.