Korean Job Discussion Forums

[merkurix]

I have worked at a couple of universities and I have realized something about the textbooks they use. Many universities use commercial English textbooks (such as those published by Pearson-Longman, Oxford University Press, etc.) and other universities use self-made textbooks published within their own university press (Seoul National University Press, etc.)

From my experience, there are things about each that are really good and things about each that really suck monkey tarts. For those of you who teach uni, what are your feeling toward textbooks made by the uni versus commercial textbooks?

[Young FRANKenstein]

[merkurix]

I will have to say that mistakes and typos are one of the main problems with in-published textbooks. The uni-pressed textbook I used was written by the foreign-faculty. Although the original book proof was near-flawless, the press staff were all Koreans and none spoke any English. There were some mistakes that got through, but not enough to be unteachable.

But there are a few things that I don't like about uni-pressed books. One is that while they get to the real nuts and bolts of what students need to know and learn, they are complete devoid of any creative or interesting themes that seem to be pervasive in a lot of commercial textbooks. As a result, students are sometimes bored to tears.

Many commercial textbooks IMHO I have found have many sucky teaching points or teach trivial or nearly impractical grammar points (for examples 3-4 pages dedicated strictly to teaching gerunds as a subject and after prepositions, etc.) But while some of points in some books suck, the units are divided with unique themes and have little interesting factoids, anecdotes, stories, etc. that help illustrate their sucky points well. These textbooks leave little to the imagination and they are kinda cool.