Job Discussion Forums

[geaaronson]

I`m a bit curious-
Who out there is discovering mistakes in their textbooks? What do they consist of?

[fluffyhamster]

The textbooks used in Japanese public schools (specifically, junior highs) quite often have strange or indeed completely incorrect exemplars for illustrating certain functions. Two separate items that I can recall:

Will you come to my birthday party? (Rather too simple, forceful, "uninviting" phrasing, with little lead-in, doubtless to convey "Future Simple". If only invitations, or indeed much about anything, were that simple!)

It's a beautiful day, ^ isn't it? ^ (Rising intonation on the tag - as if this is the sort of thing we'd be at all unsure about as we utter it!)

[arthad]

Along the lines of what fluffyhamster mentioned, there's a lot of made-up dialogue in textbooks that doesn't reflect what people actually do when they talk. Native-speaker intuition is quite unreliable as a method of determining how people make invitations, give and receive compliments, make requests, and so forth.

[fluffyhamster]

There's nothing wrong with scripted dialogues that tidy things up and nip and tuck here and there. The problem with those particular textbooks is that they're generally written by non-native university professors, so the (faulty) intuition is at least twice-removed from reality. You'd think the native-speaker advisers they have on the textbook committees would've intimated that more tentative-friendly "complex" phrases (e.g. Hey, do you want to come/would you like to come/do you fancy coming to my birthday party?) ought to have trumped the apparent demands for all-too-"easy" (yet sociolinguistically inappropriate) stuff.

[arthad]

What I'm getting at is the inherent unreliability of native-speaker intuition. What native speakers say they do is very often not what they actually do. For example, when native English speakers (at least for American English) want to make an invitation, they don't start by saying, "Would you like to come to my party on Saturday?" Instead, they make a pre-invitation first: "Hey, what are you up to Saturday?" That gives the other person a chance to say "Not much" (a signal for the other person to make the actual invitation; a go-ahead) or "Oh, I've got some homework to do, why?" (hedging) or "Oh, I've got some homework I have to do" (blocking). It's important for learners to know about things like pre-invitations so they can initiate natural interactions. But if you ask average native English speakers about how they do invitations, they won't tell you about the pre-invitation. Hence the unreliability of native speaker intuition.

So scripted dialogues aren't inherently bad; I agree with you there. But scripted dialogues should follow the structure of naturally-occurring talk. And that's where a lot of textbooks go wrong. The writers (native-speaking or otherwise) think, "Hmmm, how do we do invitations in English? We say 'Would you like to come to . . .'" without realizing that they've left out an important component of how speakers do invitations.

For a more in-depth look at what I'm talking about, see Jean Wong, "'Applying' conversation analysis in applied linguistics: Evaluating dialogue in English as a second language textbooks" (International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 40/1, 2002).

[fluffyhamster]

I quite agree that ideally, genuine fine-grained discourse structure should be finding its way into every textbook (and FWIW I think that this sort of stuff is actually quite amenable to linguistic introspection, for anyone claiming to be a language teacher - I mean, this isn't ultimately a forum for 'the average English speaker', in the sense of "the man on the street"). But the least a textbook could and really should do is get the form of the primary turn right!

Thanks for the journal lead, but I'm assuming it's not available online (unless one is doing a Masters or something and has access to university library resources). I've found books by the likes of Wardhaugh, Stubbs, McCarthy, Tsui, Eggins & Slade, or Thornbury & Slade, to be pretty dependable and a good start.
( http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=5837
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?p=25785#25785 )

[johntpartee]

[hippocampus]

OP, could you edit and change the title of this thread to its English equivalent, please? It's misleading to have it in Spanish. I ignored your thread for several days because I assumed it was a discussion of Mexican textbooks, which do not concern me, and perhaps many others. By having an English thread title I think it will be clear that you intend a more general discussion - not just Spanish texts.