Job Discussion Forums

[Glenski]

Rules for answers on this one should be fairly simple:
1. Where do you work? (country and type of school/students)
2. Book title and perhaps type of class.
3. Why you like or dislike it? Weak and strong points.

At my high school, we have many textbooks for the various English classes and grades. Native teachers use Progress for grammar classes (team taught with Japanese teacher). No textbook this year for any writing classes. No textbook for literature classes.

Progress sucks. Not only is it poorly organized, it tries to cram too much in. Granted, the reason Japanese students study is to pass entrance exams, not gain skills in conversation, but this book is awful. Poor explanations, if any, too.

[kev7161]

1. China, Private School, Senior Middle School level

2. New Interchange - Cambridge Press (the red books for Senior One and Two, Blue Books for Senior 3).

3. Good: The units are 8 pages long each covering two grammar points. Plenty of new vocabulary. Lots of interesting pictures and drawings. Textbook work in class to go with workbook outside of class. A wide variety of activities from grammar to discussion topics to classroom group activities to dialogues to CD-Rom (and a corresponding workbook) to reading aloud activities to an "advanced" page at the end of each unit.

Bad: It's all in English. I like that the kids actually have to work at getting some of this stuff, but I wish the instructions at least were in Chinese (however, I realize this book was designed to be used in any country) and maybe the vocab. lists in the back had English and Chinese. Also, it's getting outdated, time for an update! It refers to forgotten singers (like "The Cranberries") and older movies - - the pictures of technology such as computers look fairly dated as well.

Overall, I would grade this book as a "B". This year I've had a much more challenging go of it as my number of different classes and amount of students has risen. I try to do what I can outside the book, but that's not always easy to do. That's why I appreciate the variety for all students strengths: oral, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, writing, grammar.

I've been trying to get this school (although I'm leaving at the end of the school year) to use these books in all their Spoken English classes from Junior Middle School One on up. One thing I noticed is that the beginner's yellow books will introduce words, topics, and situations, then the red books will often repeat these things, yet fine tune them a bit, then even more in the blue books. But going from one type of text to another to another is just not very practical.

[Sweetsee]

Excellent question.

1. Japan, private girls' senior high school.

2. Marathon Mouth, Oral Communication.

3. I love it. It is a student-centered, multi-skill, communicative text.

[homersimpson]

1. Kagoshima Pref. (Japan), JHS
2. Sunshine (series) (Sorry, forgot to add, I am free to bring in outside resources, however, REQUIRED to use the text as the main source for classroom teaching.)
3. Lousy. The dialogues are totally unrealistic, the topics are boring for students, and it uses outdated/unnatural expressions. (But, then again, as Glenski points out, the idea is to pass a paper test and not to gain fluency).

[Guy Courchesne]

1. Mexico City, TEFL course, various types of ESL students young and old

2. Mostly New Interchange, Skyline, Oxford Business Objectives, Tiny Talk

3. New Interchange is dry, but the movement through skills work is nice to train on. The dialogues are getting old as this series needs an update.

Skyline was interesting at first, all 5 levels, but it seems aimed at a younger crowd. Easy to work with but could be more challenging.

Oxford Business Objectives has literally put some students to sleep, and is too British oriented for me. Still, good for training on for context.

Tiny Talk seems good for 3-5 yr olds, lots of song and dance, material that keeps the kids interested. It's a bit of a baby-sitter series...not sure how it would work in larger groups.

[ls650]

1. Mexican university
2. A horrible piece of trash called "English File". It's simply awful. I almost never use the thing.
3. Where do I begin...? Skimpy on material, disorganized, ugly to look at, weak examples.... ugh.

[dajiang]

1. China, private language school + attached middle school.

2. New Interchange, all levels + BEC1 Getting Ahead.

3. New Interchange: I liked working from them, but, as Guy said, it needs an update. They were very accessible for students I thought, and I liked the way it pointed out the grammar points and topics in the front of the book. The tapes are quite horrible though.

Getting Ahead: Well, the students had already done the book when they gave me the job to go over it again, because they had all failed their tests. So, basically I made all new exercises and activities for the middle school ss. Had a lot of fun though. Good textbook I thought, nicely set up, accessible for the kids with interesting role-plays and situations. The tapes were not bad I thought.

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1. China, private University

2. Speak up (Ren ren shuo yingyu) Intermediate level (the green one)

3. I chose this series myself for the uni to buy, because all topics had short, interesting texts and there were nice dialogues, with which I could fiddle a bit to use them in class. They went from closed dialogues at the start to open at the end of a chapter. Then ss could practise summarising the texts, and it was fairly suitable for self-study. Also, students took exams for which this book was used, so they liked preparing for those in my classes.

Then, there were some small mistakes (spelling, grammar) in practically every chapter. It was nice to pick those out when you come across one. It kept ss on their toes too.
I didn't like the elementary and advanced levels that much. They both had a very different setup from the intermediate one.

[Ben Round de Bloc]

1. Mexico, state university

2. Matters for elementary through upper-intermediate, First Certificate Gold and Objective CAE for higher levels

3. I really dislike the organization and much of the content of the Matters series for colloquial English. Many of the listening activities on CDs which come with the series are absolutely horrible. Fortunately, our program is in the process of undergoing a major revision, long overdue, making the curriculum less dependent on the textbook. First Certificate Gold and Objective CAE seem to work well both for basic classroom texts and for relatively independent study in our program, where the main objective at those levels is to prepare students for the Cambridge exams. However, the material and activities in the texts are too geared to ESL rather than EFL in my opinion.

[ouyang]

1. small town, chinese, public, normal university
2. Oral Workshop: Reproduction
Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press
Business Writing
(chinese publisher)
3. My oral engiish text is a joke. I've only used it in three lessons. I produced most all of my materials for my oral english classes. My business writing textbook has errors in most of the chapters, but it worked out OK for structuring the course.

My writing students were part of a three year program and the textbook's assignments were very challenging for them. I was able to focus on the basics of business correspondence using the text's writing situations. I felt the examples and situations we covered were relevant to their goals and real world prospects.

The text contained a lot of sample letters, that of course my chinese students copied word for word in assignments. The concepts were, however, comprehensible for the better students, and I was pleased to read a a number of genuinely convincing communications. The final exam was easy to relate to the textbook and that is key to any textbook's value, but especially here in china.

[basiltherat]

1. Where do you work? Damascus Syria; corporate trainees
2. Book title and perhaps type of class. Headway (British), All levels
3. Why you like or dislike it? Weak and strong points. Book ? Excellent. Serves purpose well. No need to supplement with other published materials. Interesting topics to discuss. Ample practice in all four skills. Semi-authentic listenings which are excellent. Weaknesses ? Perhaps insuffient stuff on word stress but I do that myself with trainees. Also published tests are pretty easy for most of our (at least) trainees.
Overall, very satisfied. No gripes.
regards
basil

[shmooj]

For business I find Market Leader very thorough, realistic, challenging and right from the teacher's book through to the regularly updated website, very well supported. One of the best books I've used.

[spidey]

[Plan B]

1. Zhuhai, China
2. New Interchange, Passages, Welcome to English
3. Respectively so-so, awful, terrible!

New Interchange and Passages are from the same series, the latter for higher levels. If you suppliment New Interchange enough, you can put together a pretty half-decent lesson, but it is a lot of work. The sequence of tasks is well organised, but the listening and reading exercises have no content or depth, and can become tedious if you simply go through the book.

Passages uses the same format as New Interchange, but seems to have been compiled by an imbecile. The reading texts have no gist tasks and seemingly no point to them. The grammar is always American English focused, and is often irrevelant - occassionally incorrect (e.g. singular verb in "None of my friends knows how to write good business letters"). It is difficult to create interest and conversation relating to the units as the subjects discussed are so mind-numbingly boring.

I much prefered Headway which I used in previous countries, although it is a bit grammar intensitive which the Chinese don't seem to like, and lacking in the repetitive pairwork dialogs, which the Chinese seem to love.

Welcome to English (for kids) is not even worthy of a write up.

[Mr. Kalgukshi]

I've just deleted several messages. Please stay on topic and avoid the personal insults. If not, the thread will be deleted.

[Deconstructor]

Canada

French public school