6 Writing course materials for the world: a great compromise
6.2 Coursebooks in general: confronting the issues
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6 Writing course materials for the
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for which they were not originally intended – for example, adult/young adult global coursebooks in a lower secondary school or even in junior summer schools in the UK. This is often because of misguided man- agement, but it is too frequently encouraged by marketing teams and distributors who want to make sure their products get into as many schools as possible, no matter how suitable they are for the context.
Some also accept the need for coursebooks, but argue that the quality of many of those that are published is poor – not only because they are often produced too quickly with too little piloting, but because they do not sufficiently reflect what we know about language learning and thus fail to meet the true needs of learners. Those who have argued in favour of coursebooks include: Freebairn 2000, Harmer 2001 and O’Neill 1982; those who have argued (broadly) against include Allwright 1981, Meddings and Thornbury 2009, Roberts 2005, Thornbury 2000, Thornbury and Meddings 2001, Tice 1991.
As coursebook writers ourselves, we obviously accept that there is an important role for a coursebook in many classes. It would be impossible for us to write them if we thought otherwise. Coursebooks can provide a useful resource for teachers. Providing they are used flexibly, we think they can be adapted and supplemented to meet the needs of specific classes. But it would be foolish to ignore many of the questions raised by the debate. These are some of the more important ones.
1. If one of your pedagogic principles is that creativity is important in the classroom, then how can you make sure that your coursebook does not take away investment in and responsibility for learning from teachers and learners?
2. If coursebooks are sometimes used by schools to maintain consist- ency of syllabus, how can you at the same time make sure they reflect the dynamic and interactive nature of the learning process?
3. Although it is true no coursebook can cater for all the individual needs of all learners all of the time, can you provide enough material to meet most of the needs most of the time and build in enough flex- ibility to enable teachers to individualise it?
4. If the language presented in coursebooks includes few genuine exam- ples of authentic or corpus-based material, how can you ensure that your samples of use are as natural as possible?
5. If coursebooks are frequently predictable in format and content, how can you bring to your material a feeling that it is not boring?
(Indeed, Rinvolucri 2002 felt the need to suggest ways of ‘humanis- ing’ the coursebook.)
We cannot pretend that when we started out we were fully aware of the significance of all these questions, but in different ways at different
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137 times of the process they were all asked, either by the editorial team or by ourselves.
There were other issues. In our situation we have written what is sometimes misleadingly called a ‘global’ coursebook – which really means a coursebook for a restricted number of teaching situations in many different countries rather than all teaching situations in all countries. And those who dislike coursebooks feel they have an even stronger case against the global coursebook: the all-singing, all-dancing, glitzy (expensive) multimedia package with a dedicated website of extras, usually produced in a native-speaker situation but destined for the world with all language in the book (including rubrics) in the target language. Indeed, as if to establish their role in commercial globalisa- tion, publishers now regard the global coursebook as an international
‘brand’, and produce endless ‘new editions’, which makes it harder than ever to get anything different published. Words such as ‘imperialist’
and ‘new colonialist’ are sometimes used to criticise these books (see socio-political critics such as Gray 2010 and Holliday 1994). Some of those who favour this line of argument feel that many teachers without the ‘benefits’ of a native-speaker situation are resentful and unwilling victims of a situation manipulated by an alliance of local institution and foreign publisher. On the other hand those who argue in favour of the global coursebook – again, often those making money out of it – point out that good sales worldwide ensure a high production quality and enable publishers to finance interesting but less commercially viable publications on the backs of the big success stories.
From a pedagogic point of view we knew that one of the dangers of this kind of publication is that many of the cultural contexts in the materials and the text-topics can seem irrelevant to the learners. The material inevitably lacks the targeting to specific learning situations in a particular culture. We were also aware that many classes do not have the advantages of others. Not all of our potential users would be like the private language schools in the UK (one of our potential markets) with their small classes, courses of 19–25 hours a week and the support of the native-speaker environment. On the other hand, the UK situation has the disadvantages (as well as some advantages) of the multilingual classroom with the teacher frequently unable to speak the learners’ own languages and minimally aware of their cultures.
6.2.1 The notion of compromise
With international materials it is obvious that the needs of individual students and teachers, as well as the expectations of particular schools in particular countries, can never be fully met by the materials themselves.
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Indeed, most users seem to accept that what they choose will in many ways be a compromise and that they will have to adapt the materials to their situation.
This is a reasonable approach – indeed it prevents the illusion that situation-specific materials can do the job without the teacher having to adapt the materials to a particular group of individual students at a particular time. In other words, contrary to many current arguments about the inhibiting role of coursebooks, international course materials can actually encourage individualisation and teacher creativity rather than the opposite. It has been argued by some of the ‘opponents’ of coursebooks referred to above that teaching units these days are over- integrated, so that teachers get locked into one way of using them. In fact, many materials are beginning to look more like resource materials rather than traditional coursebooks and many multi-skills books help teachers to be flexible in their approach by clearly signposting where les- sons can naturally finish and by making a point of not expecting users to refer back to language studied in a previous lesson. The better Teacher’s Books will also suggest pathways through even well-integrated units and urge teachers to cut, adapt and supplement the material for their context, as well as introducing personalised practice where possible (for example, see Hyde et al. 2008; also some books on methodology such as Cunningsworth 1995 and Harmer 2007). Everything depends on the relationship that a user, in particular a teacher, has or is allowed to have with the material. Coursebooks are tools which only have life and meaning when there is a teacher present. They are never intended to be a straitjacket for a teaching programme in which the teacher makes no decisions to add, to animate or to delete. The fact that course mat- erials are sometimes treated too narrowly – for example, because of the lack of teacher preparation time, the excesses of ministry or institu- tion power, the demands of examinations, or the lack of professional training – should not be used as a reason to write off global course- books. Inevitably, in any global coursebook there will be material that will appear dated and irrelevant to the user’s context, but used judi- ciously, published material can free up the teacher’s time, not only to focus on the learning process but also to introduce into the classroom topics and material that are current and relevant.
Obviously no publisher is going to make a substantial investment unless there is a prospect of substantial sales. Material has to be usable by teachers and students alike or publishers lose their investment – hype can encourage a teacher or school to try a course once, but no amount of hype can encourage the same course to be readopted. In many cases, once a course has been adopted, financial constraints mean that the coursebooks will remain on the shelves for a long time, so it is very
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139 important that those responsible for choosing it do so for the right rea- sons and are sure that it is appropriate to the learners and the context, at least in the eyes of the school. In order to work, the material up to a point has to be targeted to a particular type of student, in a particular type of teaching situation, and a particular type of teacher with a par- ticular range of teaching skills and who has assumptions about meth- odology which he/she shares with his/her colleagues. (See Mares 2003 on the challenge of writing for other teachers.)
There is no point in writing a course for teachers of adult students and expecting it to be used by primary teachers, although as we said above there are inappropriate adoptions. These teaching contexts are different anywhere in the world. And yet adult teaching in most coun- tries has a lot in common – particularly these days with far greater pro- fessional integration than ever before (thanks to conferences, courses, professional magazines, ELT websites, teacher forums, the prevalence of CELTA (Certificate in English Language Training to Adults) training in some parts of the world, and so on). We felt that many of the situa- tions around the world in which teachers would want to use our mater- ials did have a lot in common: for example, teachers used to organising group work and aiming for improved communicative competence in the classroom and young adult students very similar to the ones we were used to in the UK.
6.2.2 The publisher’s compromise
Compromise is not just something that is shared by users. Publishers also compromise – otherwise they would not get the material they want, that is material that they can not only be proud of when exhib- iting against other publishers but which sells because potential users want to use it. Publishers will fail, and have failed, if they try to go for every market and produce something which is thereby only ano- dyne and anonymous. The Eastern, Middle Eastern, Latin American, European and UK markets may have certain things in common (they may all be prepared to commit themselves to the same grammar syl- labus, for example), but their differences (for example whether or not they use the Roman script or whether or not speaking is emphasised in the secondary school system) will ensure that publishers are cautious if they aim to sell globally. And are there many examples of an over- cautious coursebook succeeding commercially? Most successes (such as the adult/young adult courses Headway and English File) are usually seen to be breaking new ground at the time they are published.
Which is not to say a publisher is going to be a great innovator either – such courses, too, rarely succeed. (See Hopkins 1995 for some of the
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reasons why.) Indeed many of those courses that are felt to be new are in fact successful because they have something which is ‘old’ about them. One of Headway’s successes when it was first published all those years ago was that it reverted to a familiar grammatical syllabus when many other coursebooks were considered to have become too function- ally oriented. The sensible balance – a compromise of principle – will surely be between innovation and conservatism, a blend of the new and different with the reassuringly familiar.
Designers may also need to compromise at times, too, since those who have too great an influence weaken materials commercially in the long-run. In our experience what is good design for a designer is not necessarily a good design for a teacher. We ourselves have heard design- ers severely criticise the design of successful books and praise books that are not thought by teachers to be well designed. Does it matter to a teacher whether there are one, two or three columns on a page and whether a unit is of uniform length in its number of pages? Maybe it is important to some teachers, but in our experience, what matters more is that it is absolutely clear on the page where things are and what their purpose is and that the balance (and tone) of visuals and text is right for their students. Whilst publishers would undoubtedly agree with this in principle and argue that the number of columns and pages per unit affects usability, there is sometimes a worrying gap between the aesthetic principles of a designer and the pedagogic principles of the writers.
Also there are real and necessary pedagogic constraints which design- ers have to accept as well as design constraints that authors have to accept. Sometimes it is necessary pedagogically to sacrifice illustration for words (texts, rubrics, etc.) in order to make a series of activities work in the classroom, just as it is sometimes necessary to cut back on, say, a practice activity to make it fit in with an adequately spaced visual. This is not to decry the role of designers. They have an essential (and inte- gral) function in making sure that the authors’ ideas are properly and attractively presented. They also need to make the students and teach- ers feel they are using materials with an up-to-date but usable look.
Compromise has to be a benefit.
6.2.3 The authors
And what of the authors? They, too, find themselves compromising – and indeed they often feel themselves compromised by publishers, par- ticularly authors who are experienced teachers with a strong conviction of how learners learn best. This is hardly surprising if a publisher who has done little real research of their own (with their only input coming
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141 from the hunches of marketing managers and conventional publishing wisdom) relies on the authors’ own experience and then later tells them they cannot put their ideas into practice.
But teachers who are authors also have to compromise. Their teach- ing experience is often different from that of many intended users and their ideas might not work in a majority of classrooms. They have to beware of being too much the teacher trainer and look also at what students want, rather than concentrate on new ideas for teachers. It is very tempting to try and impose your views about what should happen in a classroom when the learning experience for different learners is so diverse. This is a common problem in coursebooks (possibly our own included) where the writers are used to working in a privileged learning environment which has such things as study centres, small motivated classes, smart boards and so on.
It is not for nothing that most global coursebooks aim to cater for a range of different strategies and learning styles. What may be successful in the context of a particular lesson for the writer or fit into a skills and supplementary book does not necessarily have a place in a coursebook where a range of syllabuses are operating, where balance of activity and skill is necessary and where there is often one eye on recycling and revision. And another major, often overlooked consideration is that the material has to fit on the page so that students can actually see it.
Authors who are not teachers also have to compromise. Whilst there are writing skills which not all teachers have – such as structuring a sequence of activities and balancing it with usable visuals – and there are skills that experienced writers have which teachers need if they are to write (see Walters 1994 for a light-hearted view), so there are teaching realities which authors long out of the classroom have to recognise if they are to produce materials that teachers want to teach with. In a lesson of 50 minutes the register still has to be taken, homework given back, announcements made and revision undertaken with students who have just come in tired from work and an irritating traffic jam. And that activ- ity in your coursebook cannot work unless you allow an hour for it!
So all authors find themselves compromising and having compromise forced upon them.