Job Discussion Forums

[Salam]

Evening all.

I'm looking to buy some text books for class 4-6, junior and senior high (nine levels total). Does anyone know the distributors here in Jakarta for say Longman (New English Parade) or OUP (Headway)?

Alternatively if any of you have had this experience recently and have found some better material, please share your findngs. I'll be making a trip to SG on the 13th for a few days so if there are better options that you know of there, then please pass them on.

Thanks.

[gugelhupf]

The Indonesian distributor for Longman, Pearson Education, is rather inconveniently located in Singapore. Can't remember the address but easy to find via Google.

For senior high I like the Longman 'Cutting Edge' series. All our teachers find these easy to use and they fit quite well with the Indonesian educational psyche as well. By this I mean that the books have a communicative approach but also include some explicit grammar materials. The new editions are very international although the tapes/CD's use a lot of British English. There is an 'American Cutting Edge' series now but it is so absolutely US biased that I'd tend to avoid it.

[wailing_imam]

I'm a Headway man through and through, but I really think it depends on what nationality you are teaching. I used Headway with Arabs and Chinese and found it very effective. However, Indonesians are a MUCH more communicative bunch than the above nationalities and need that interactive learning style. You could try, as mentioned, Cutting Edge or Natural English.

In Singapore there is an entire (though small) shop called the ESL Book Store on Cuppage Road (not far from Orchard Rd). Also, Kinokuniya in Ngee Ann City has an excellent ESL section and will take big orders. Make sure your school provides you with enough cash though, these ESL books ain't cheap!

[TEAM_PAPUA]

New Interchange is my favorite book for General English & the teachers book is full of supplementary materials & activities.

[guruengerish]

Hey, it's nice to read such positive comments. A few days back, someone was taking me to task for saying that I much preferred Headway to the books we had to use at EF.

As you've said, Headway and Cutting Edge are excellent publications, and the extras are worth getting but not cheap. (Phonetics, Homework etc).

I've not seen the American versions, and don't want to. I had enough of that teaching TOEFL.

[wailing_imam]

New Interchange is an absolutely awful series in my humble opinion. Our school in Singapore stopped using it after there were so many complaints from students who had previously been taught with Headway. Okay, so there are a few more communicative activities, but nothing that supplementary books can't provide. The problem with New Interchange is that it is not really sure where it is going, this is even more so after the red (elementary) book. Modals of probability are stuck somewhere halfway through the pre-intermediate book and the contrast between past simple and past continuous is first brought up at the beginning of the intermediate (green) book, a sequence, which to my mind, is baffling. There are plenty more example of this. Look at the pathetetic vocab list and embarrasingly sparse grammar points and exercises. Plus, it is just a touch too American for my liking.

It simply isn't challenging enough.

BURN NEW INTERCHANGE!!!

[uilleannpiper]

[wailing_imam]

Get real Piper!

A twenty seven hour teaching week is already enough work without spending hours designing and making exercises from a local newspaper! Yes, if you are lucky and spend 10 hours a week teaching, like many teachers in China, then this is doable, but to your average salary-man tefler, a text book exists so that he doesn't have to spend half his life making up exercises.

Your comments are idealistic, but frankly not realistic.

[uilleannpiper]

[TEAM_PAPUA]

[wailing_imam]

My classes are three hours long. At my school I teach the same class three hours a day everyday for four months. This is the time it takes for them to complete a Headway level and be fully prepared for the next level (if they fail, and some do, it's another 4 months for them on an alternative book at the same level). This means around 7 days a unit, which sounds like a long time, but given the immense volume of stuff to cover, it is no time at all. I use a text book for around half that time each class maximum. Text books get dry and as you say, the student can do most of the work at home (make them, spend that half a class discussing the work). I use relevant supplements from reward etc etc for the rest of the class. Yes, I could use supplements and alternative activities for a whole class BUT I think a text book gives a course structure and body, something language learners and teachers appreciate. Learning a language is a methodical process and some text books have got the grammar side of it down just about right. I am amazed just how well students respond to certain text books and develop a strong sense of loyalty to a brand and get turned off quickly by other books.

The one skill I haven't seen covered anywhere near adequately in any text book is writing. For that, I ignore the text book entirely and use my own methods and resources.

[uilleannpiper]

I appreciate the fact that, having three hour classes, trying to make activities without the aid of a texbook can get heavy going. I'm not anti-textbook altogether. My main points are -

1) Textbooks like Headway are designed to be (at least they were when I used them) a 'complete' language course, ie, a little bit of reading, writing, listening, speaking and grammar etc, such that all a teacher has to do is follow the book page by page to the end. Sounds good, however...

2) Most Asian students, including Indonesian, have had English lessons from a textbook shoved down their throats all through school. Indeed, my most painful students when teaching EFL in Australia where the muscle-bound Korean guys who would pick an argument with me at the drop of a hat because the 'exceptions' (and there are many of them) to the grammar rules went against what their textbooks told them. Yet could they USE English? Nope. The last thing they need is more textbook-based instruction.

3) Textbooks use contrived language. This often means spending time 'undoing' language or rewriting the text to suit the students' context. Language is best learnt when the content and context is familiar to the students. Heavily Anglo/Euro/Amero/Austrocentric texts can often be an obstacle, rather than a benefit, to learning.

4) Textbooks assume an order of language difficulty. There is no such thing as difficult language and simple language. Who says when a student should or shouldn't be introduced to present continuous forms? Some students demonstrate an ability to grasp what we assume to be difficult language before those we assume to be simple. There is no structure to how an individual student learns language. We all pick up on different concepts at different stages.

True, Imam, some students benefit from a structured text-book approach. Perhaps that is also because they know of no other way to learn. Schooling for them has been lock-step rote learning since the start so of course they're going to be comfortable with that. Then they head overseas to do uni and suddenly they actually have to think, and argue, and....shock of shocks....actually present criticism to their (god-like) lecturer. Suddenly there is no structured, texbook learning.

Team Papua said - "Also when the school doesn't care about anything but the money, why should the teachers break their backs for peanuts"

Well, this is where my humanitarian side kicks in....When I taught at EF for peanuts I noticed that not all students came from rich well-to-do families. Some had done the hard yards and scraped together the money to attend at least one level of instruction. I wanted the best for my students, rich or poor. I also wanted my students to think the best of me regardless of what they thought of the school. So I put in the effort to make my lessons as varied as possible using a many different activities and resources as possible. With the EF books you had to anyway.

I wanted them to think "(School name) was rubbish but (teacher's name)was good" rather than "(School name) was rubbish and so were the teachers".

Here endeth the sermon.

[gugelhupf]

[quote=


The biggest fallacy is the one that states that language should be 'simplified' or modified to suit the learner level, which is the idea behind textbooks. Rubbish. .[/quote]

Oh, so all the work done by Stephen D Krashen and a cast of thousands is 'rubbish'? All that stuff about comprehensible input that people studied for years can be dismissed at the stroke of a pen?

Hope you have the evidence to back up such a bold claim.

[uilleannpiper]

There's a difference between simplified language and comprehensible input. When you simplify a text you assume you are doing the student a favour. You assume you are cutting out what the learner doesn't (yet) need and you assume that what you are simplifying is useful to the learner.

Comprehensible input on the other hand, is that part of a text among the whole, unmodified, text that the learner can comprehend. There is the non-scaffolded comprehensible input that the student has already learnt previously and thus understands, there is the scaffolded input that the student comprehends with the aid of scaffolding, that is, support from the teacher plus visual/aural cues, and then there is the incomprehensible input that the student is yet to learn to comprehend - all within the one text/audio/video.

The role of the teacher is to facilitate the student's working with the text in order to use that which is already comprehensible to take the scaffolded comprehensible text and internalise it so that it moves to comprehensible, which in turn brings the incomprehensible into the scaffolded conprehensible and so on and so forth.

Thus the text can be as detailed or as 'simple' as you like without having been modified by the teacher. Granted, modification is sometimes necessary, but simplifiying a text results in contrived text which may not necessarily be meeting the needs of all students.

Working with unmodified text allows students to get out of it what they are able to at that particular point in time.

[uilleannpiper]

BTW, here's an article on the way Krashen's Comprehensive Input +1 theory is applied in the classroom - Greek students learning English in Greece. No mention that I can see of a textbook although paragraph 6 possibly points to the use of a text as playing a minor support role. In fact, after reading it, how can a textbook be 'Communicative'? What are the students communicating with? The pages?

Take it as you see fit. I appreciate that it may not necessarily be the ideal way of teaching in the EF-type classroom but plenty of food for thought. Nor is it something that our crash-course PPP (Presentation, Practice, Production) hoops we had to learn to jump through very quickly under pressure at great cost (just what do they do with that $2500?) ever bothered to mention.

http://www.uncwil.edu/cte/et/Resnotes/Yiangou/index.htm

Cheers,

UP