Job Discussion Forums

[moonraven]

Thanks, basil.

Sure beats the mean-spirited attitudes of some others who have participated in this thread.

[valley_girl]

I dislike Headway because I find it too 'light and fluffy'. I like more meat and potatoes in an integrated text. It gives me more to work with as an instructor.

[XXX]

I used the Headway series for a brief time. It wasn't too bad, but I did have a problem with some of the Brit slang. " Loose a quid, find a fiver" might be a quaint comment, but it means nothing to a person who isn't going to the UK. Also, in one of the readings, the phrase " to burn a treat" was used. Does anybody out there have a clue as to what this means?

[spidey]

[ls650]

[shmooj]

[basiltherat]

[Rice Paddy Daddy]

American Headway is one of the best textbook series on the market.

Boring - maybe some of you are relying too much on the text. Use the text as a springboard for some of your own, creative activities.

Adapt new ideas based on what they have in the text.

most of these texts however appeal to an ESL audience and not an EFL audience and that's a weakness sometimes. The peopel I work with don't live in L.A. or London and don't care if the Queen has 3 yorkshire terriers or whatever...

the oxford / cambridge series' are as good as it's gonna get, imo.

[merlin]

Headway leads the way ...

in replacing teachers with a robotic finger able to rewind and play a cassette.

What's scary is that they really are the top of the line. I've used dozens of other series and can't say any are better than headway.

Interchange - nope
Side by side - nope
True to life - nope
Cambridge English Course - nope

Lots of others more or less the same old thing. Some considerably worse.

Read aloud about the family who got lost at sea and drank their own urine. Now class, who among you would drink your own urine?
How about the story about the soccer team that crashed in the Andes? Now class, discuss in pairs if you would eat your fellow students in a similar situation.

Now have a nice weekend - I have a date with reality and I'm outta here 'til monday.

[Deconstructor]

Headway: GARBAGE!!!

Then again, most ESL texts are garbage if you use them as principle or supplementary. Material should be real world whether for reading, writing, listening or speaking. Hence, newspaper/magazine articles, short stories, videos of interesting programs and outings are the order of the day.

By using these texts we as teachers are under the impression that language could actually be taught to students by the teacher as s/he stands in front of the class and bla bla blas. We try to objectify language, separate its different aspects and put them on a platter for the students' consumption. Why do you think that so much of class time and text space are dedicated to grammar, which is in fact the least important aspect of language learning? It is because grammar is the most objective aspect of language; it is, in fact, the most teachable and learnable. As a student tries to communicate, however, grammar becomes the least of his/her problems. As a result most students never go beyond intermediate levels. Teachers confined to these texts generally are forced to make language trite, boring, filtered and completely devoid of the real world.

I never use any texts at all. Whenever a text is forced upon me I find ways to create the illusion that I'm using them while I do something totally different and useful.

In my classes I am never at the center. My job is to make sure that the students are constantly talking, listening and working together. Using authentic material means that language is never filtered and awkward. I never force them to play stupid games. Instead, students are exposed to great deal of nuance and idiomaticity, which could never be taught in any meaningful way using grammar and/or vocabulary texts. In fact, grammar and vocab should never be taught explicitly.

Just an example of one of my activities that takes about two hours: I divide my class in half and each read one newspaper or magazine article. Before they read, they work together and read some of the questions about the article; they clarify and predict them in order to develop a background. When done, they start answering the questions in note form together; that is, they work on the same question at the same time before moving on to the next question. They must all have the same answers. This makes sure that they are sufficiently dependent on one another and will continue working together. Once they finish answering the questions, students with the same article use the questionnaires only and tell back the article. They use them only as a resource in case they forget any info; they are not supposed to read the answers. This is the phase where they are practicing for fluency and clarity. (If you've taught grammar earlier, it could be incorporated into the tellback.) After a few tellbacks each student pairs with one who read a different article and retells it. Now they must make sure that they are as clear and fluent as possible. After all, learning a language is first and foremost about repetition.

I regularly tell my students that in order to learn a given language they must participate in it; that is to say, if they want to learn how to swim they�d better be in the water. Learning to swim outside the pool, moving your arms and legs, is easy until I push you into the pool where you will sink like a stone. Using grammar and vocabulary texts only is like teaching swimming without ever letting the student go into the water.

[moonraven]

Deconstructor:

I couldn't agree more!

[shmooj]

Decon... do you by any chance work in a multilingual classroom in an English speaking country?

[Deconstructor]

[carnac]

Snoopy:
Your mention of using Headway with Gulf Arabs is one area of my problems with the books. For instance, an actual count of the number of references to alcohol/wine/beer/whiskey proves interesting (and amazing!). Fine perhaps in an gin-swilling ESL context, but problematic in a Muslim EFL setting. The unit starring rabbit-toothed Sister Mary Nirvana is not particularly productive and I skip it completely. Some of the male students greatly enjoy the chicks in convertibles with their boobs hanging out, but other more religious types have some objections. And hey, how about those "rock stars"?
In the grammar, I would arrange the order of introduction of tenses differently for what are in my view valid linguistic reasons, but we can all agree to disagree on this. The treatment of stative verbs is extremely weak, at best. At various places in the workbooks, usages seem to suddenly pop up with little to no preparation within the text. I will say that the structure of the workbooks seems to me to be better thought out than that of the student books, apparently influenced by different authors.
I have many other problems with Headway, and do indeed use large amounts of supplementary materials, Grammar In Use being very helpful, as are internet sources.
Worldwide, there seems to be a serious lack of well-written area- and culture- specific EFL texts, probably since the larger publishing houses make more money avoiding texts targeting smaller markets And any such text, were it to exist, would cut into sales of their big-selling "only-game-in-town" ESL texts.
I see a parallel with pharmaceutical companies only developing drugs for big-name diseases since the rarer illnesses hold less opportunity for profits after development and marketing costs.
As always, IMHO.
By the way, Snoopy, your gratuitous reference to eye-blinkers and camels is offensive. You should consider teaching in an other-than-EFL context if ths is the extent of your cultural understanding.

[shmooj]