Korean Job Discussion Forums

[bassexpander]

Anyone else use this textbook. It's printed by Oxford, which we all know is a British company.

Personally I can't stand it (we were forced to use it for low-level classes). Second, it is called "American" Headway, but so far we've seen more British-oriented additions for it to be called, "American" Headway.

We just finished an exercise where Mr. McSporran "goes to the pub". We've also seen other gems like, "newsagent" and equal footing given to British money.

American, my ass!

I'm not against teaching British English... I am against misrepresentation.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

They should call it North American Headway. We have pubs and newsagents (well, I guess we'd usually say news stands) in Canada.

I've noticed an interesting amount of English English in our new high school textbooks. They try to keep the spelling and culture American, but obviously at least one of the contributers is British, Australian, or perhaps Canadian, educated.

[some waygug-in]

It's definitely not very American, but it is a great improvement over the all British series. The problem with that text and many others like it, is that it moves through things far too quickly. It needs heavy supplimentation, especially in the first units. The students will need way more work with the simple present tense and reading. I suggest you give supplimentary reading from books like "Easy True Stories" or "Can You believe it?"
or some other graded reading series.

[Rory_Calhoun27]

For a good time, remind them that Britain is the 51st state, and Korea is soon to be the 52nd..... nothin' like igniting the jingoistic fervor in ANY population!

[Xuanzang]

It has a story about a Scottish retiree in the yellow Headway.

[lifeinkorea]

Maybe it was meant for Americans

[harlowethrombey]

I've noticed too, that our textbooks are def. written in a British style. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I thought the emphasis for education was for North American (Canadian/U.S.) style English.

So now I get to try and unravel for students:

"Surely you've been there, have you not?"


Oh, and the best part with presenting a syntaxual nightmare like that is the students try and use it later!

Damn brits. . .

[b-class rambler]

A case of the opposite.

Anyone remember a book from a few years ago called "American Streamline"? There was a British version too, based on the original American Streamline. But the publishers' idea of Anglicising it was to remove the black people from the cartoon pictures and replace them with gents in top hats and tails. Business situations also seemed to feature men in bowler hats with umbrellas. And many of the people pictured seemed to have their noses pointing slightly upwards as if showing their disapproval of something.

Why not just produce books that simply explain the different uses of English in different places? 98%, or probably more, of the language we use is exactly the same and it should be perfectly doable to have some kind of end of chapter note that in whatever other country than the one this book is focussed on, some other variant of expressions we practised in this chapter is used.

[harlowethrombey]

Actually, for all the hate I lump on Nova their textbooks were really quite good. Short lessons with common, useful expressions. Well-thought-out (if short) activities.

And, they even had special boxes to explain British and Australian alternate expressions.

Keeping the English not necessarily simple, but reasonably common would be a nice idea. Most native speakers dont use several apposatives when they write or speak. And why teach the passive form when its frownded upon in the West?

It's a better solution than just presenting the kids with convoluted sentences they will most likely never, ever see in the real world:

'Every student that was not in attendance was marked as absent during the meeting, after school last Tuesday.'

[bassexpander]

[b-class rambler]

[Milwaukiedave]

I used it when I worked at a hagwon years ago and haven't used it since then. The book was decent, but not one of the best on the market. If I remember correctly, our school ended up changing books shortly before I left.

[moosehead]

I think some of you should form a consortium, write multi-linqual English textbooks and then branch out and market them on the ESL landscape.

please don't forget to have a toast to moosehead for this thought some day when you're sipping your brew on a sunny beach while your banker counts your gold

[John_ESL_White]

[TECO]

Liz and John Soars are British.

American Headway was written by British Authors and published by a British company (as you already mentioned).

So I guess it's possible that some expressions, word choices or phrases that are more British have slipped through.

Which level are you specifically referring to or are you referring to Level 1 - 4?

I've mainly ever used American Headway 2 and 3 and prefer it to New Headway.

I can't stand teaching British English, which I find myself doing right now in a few of my courses since I'm using texts that were selected by British teachers.