Teacher Discussion Forums

[erizabesu]

I posted a week or so ago in the Secondary Education forum. Maybe this forum gets more action?

I used the Cambridge English for Schools book before. My students, Japanese middle school EFL students, liked the content and the teachers got a lot of mileage out of the support materials. I haven't found anything quite like it.

Can anyone recommend a monolingual course textbook, aimed at middle years teaching four skills EFL? I'd like to see what my choices are.

Thanks!

[Sally Olsen]

In Mongolia, they were keen about the Longman series. In Greenland they used The Blue Cat series. I think that it just depends on the which salesman got to them first because I found the same things in most series. I really prefer to make my own materials so they are more relevant to the students and have local references and pictures. If you have a digatel camera and a computer you can make your own books and they will be far more effective than a foreign made book. For instance, there was a whole lesson on dishwashers in the Longman and the Mongolians didn't have dishwashers. There was a whole section on trees in the Blue Cat and Greenlanders don't have trees. It makes it really difficult to make the lesson interesting for them when they haven't experienced these things. There was also a story of an English boy who made a pet out of hawk and was upset when it was killed by his brother, never spoke to him again and left home. All these ideas were foreign to the Greenlanders. So making your own books guarantees that you pass on their values and interests. Someday they will learn about dishwashers, trees and English fondness for animals but when their English is much better and you can carry on discussions like this.

[erizabesu]

I'm looking for proprietary course books, thanks.

Thanks for the tip about Longman course book series. What a byzantine website, though. - http://www.longmanusahome.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=105&Itemid=329