Focus on coursebooks: IATEFL 2019 Roundups 2

IATEFL 2019 ROUNDUPS 2

IATEFL 2019 roundups 2: Focus on coursebooks

A second thread that developed through my (obviously, entirely personal) IATEFL 2019 experience was the analysis and criticism of coursebooks in ELT. Taken in chronological order, this post summarises the following talks:

Brian Tomlinson (retired), leading expert on materials development, looked at ways we can make coursebooks more effective in his talk ‘Performing the coursebook’

Laila Al Hajri (University of Exeter) summarised her research into how teachers actually use coursebooks in a talk entitled ‘Classifying teachers’ ways of approaching a prescribed reading textbook (Pathways 3)’.

Geoff Jordan (University of Leicester) discussed the issue of whether published ELT materials are actually the best way of teaching English in ‘We need to talk about Coursebooks’.



Brian Tomlinson: Performing the Coursebook



Photo credit @cecilianobreelt

Brian began his talk with a outline of the limitations of coursebooks (see list in slide below), all of which lead to a less-than-optimal learning experience for students. He agreed with Geoff Jordan (see below) that the Presentation – Practice – Production (PPP) format used in many books contradicts what is known from research into how languages are learned. In fact he went as far as to say that the PPP model an illusion, and is actually the worst way to learn a language. He argued that while PPP is a safe, reliable framework for many teachers, if you’ve been teaching that way for twenty years, why don’t you try something different?

Given that teachers often little choice but to work with a coursebook, Brian claimed that the input in a coursebook can be brought to life by performance. The material can be performed by the teacher, by the learners, but ideally by the teacher and students together. He then went on to suggest a number of ways that this can be done.

For example, teachers can introduce a coursebook text with a personal anecdote or funny story, see @adi_rajan’s tweet below.

In another example, Brian described a text in Global Intermediate (Clandfield & Benne 2012), which introduced a puzzle:

Two soldiers are patrolling a wall, separating their nation from the enemy. They have to keep their eyes right at all times in order to survey enemy territory, but as they turn at the end of their patrol, they are looking in the wrong direction.

First of all, Brian elicited examples of the wall from the audience: The Great Wall of China; Trump’s border wall, or the wall in Game of Thrones. He then asked us to work out the solution to the problem by standing up and acting out the movements. Finally he asked a couple of groups to perform their solutions (no definitive answer was given, by the way).

Brian illustrated how to engage learners and encourage focus on salient aspects of the input by means of a narrative text about two brothers. The room (representing the class or group) was divided into two sides, each representing one of the brothers. At different points in the story, we had to perform the different brothers’ actions or personalities, e.g. the first brother was lazy; the second brother worked hard in the fields all day. At the end, Brian asked questions related to the story, especially directing questions about the other brother to the group that did not perform those actions, to check comprehension, e.g. Which brother inherited the money? etc.

Dividing the room can also be useful to enliven typical coursebook dialogues, which can be ‘performed’ in unusual and unexpected ways. Having the learners act out the dialogues while in character encourages them to invest more deeply in the text. Brian gave this fairly standard CB dialogue as an example:

Encounter in a shoe shop

Salesman: Good morning madam.

Customer: Good morning.

Salesman: What can I do for you today?

Customer: I’d like a pair of red shoes.

Salesman: Certainly madam. What size do you take?

Customer: Size 3.

Salesman: What about these?

 The above dialogue could be made considerably more interesting by introducing the following conditions:

According to Brian, the more unusual the characters or conditions you impose, the more memorable. Apparently, this relates to what is known as ‘bizarreness theory’, which suggests that learning impact is increased by novelty factor.

References

Tomlinson, B. (2016). Achieving a match between SLA theory and materials development. In B. Tomlinson (Ed.), SLA research and materials development for language learning (pp. 3-22). New York: Routledge.

Tomlinson, B. & Masuhara, H. (2018). Chapter 4 – Materials adaptation. In B. Tomlinson & H. Masuhara. The complete guide to the theory and practice of materials development for language learning (pp. 82-116). Hoboken, Wiley-Blackwell.

Tomlinson, B. & Masuhara, H. (2020). SLA applied. Applying second language acquisition research to language learning.Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.




Laila Al Hajri (University of Exeter): Classifying teachers’ ways of approaching a prescribed reading textbook (Pathways 3).

Laila’s talk was a summary of her ongoing research into how EFL teachers approach a prescribed textbook (in this case Pathways 3). According to research in the use of textbooks in Mathematics, Brown (2009) describes how teachers use materials in unique ways in order to ‘craft instructional episodes’ (p. 118), so Laila argued that teaching necessarily involves a process in which teachers design, redesign and interpret the resources within imposed constraints.

Background to the study

Teaching involves an interplay between the agent and the physical and cultural tools. Laila observed that teachers question how to use coursebooks, either individually or in groups and develop a framework for use, described by Chong (2016) as having two phases: pre-active and interactive.

1. Perception: the teacher interprets the available resources

2. Mobilisation: deciding how to proceed. Brown (2009) identifies three types of coursebook use:
- Improvising
- Adapting (deleting, substituting and changing)
- Offloading (following the book without changes)

These form a continuum of teacher agency:

 
Finally, the teacher uses her personal, practical knowledge about the learners and about the curriculum to best fit the resources to the classes. All of these factors together represent the teacher’s ‘pedagogical design capacity’.

The study

Laila’s study followed thirteen EFL teachers of tertiary level reading courses in three different institutions in Oman. By means of lesson observations and semi-structured interviews, the teachers were categorised according to the way they used the prescribed material:

Improvising – 1
Only one teacher did this, and this teacher worked in site 2, the only institution in the study which organised a collaborative project to produce materials to support the coursebook. The justification given for this was that the book did not prepare the students sufficiently for the exam.

Adapting – 8
The teachers who adapted or ‘tinkered’ with the material did so for the following reasons:
- The students’ level did not correpsond to the coursebook.
- To adapt the material more closely to the learners’ needs.
- Because of their beliefs about teaching

Offloading – 4
These teachers explained their decision to ‘offload’, because:
- The material was culturally sensitive
- They followed policy
- Washback effect: they wanted to prepare students for the exam (based on the book).
Laila further noted that teachers who chose to offload tend to have a higher teacher talking time during class. They also resort more often to extemporization: mimicking, drawing, giving examples, etc. in order to clarify meaning.

Laila further concluded that teachers tended to follow the book closely upon first using it, and then would change to adapt or improvise as their familiarity with the material increased. In all but one of the institutions in the study, it was the teacher’s responsibility to customize the course material, but where support was given, this was more likely to happen.




Geoff Jordan: We need to talk about Coursebooks

@neil_mcm

Geoff Jordan has gained something of a reputation for his criticism of ELT institutions. This certainly contributed to the packed room at his talk ‘We need to talk about Coursebooks’ (as can be seen in @MatthewEllman’s tweet below). Whatever the reason for being there, those of us attending were left in little doubt of Geoff’s passionate advocacy of Task-Based Learning and Teaching (TBLT) as the approach which offers the most efficient learning experience.

In this talk, Geoff presented arguments to explain how the coursebook-driven model of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) may be flawed. He began by asking us to consider the way in which we had learned our first language:

- People talked to you and slowly you joined in
- Did anybody talk to you about the language? No.
- Did anybody use the term present perfect? No.
- Did anybody teach you lexical chunks? No.

 In contrast, the most popular ELT coursebooks do all of the following:

All of which lead us to the following problems:

Problem 1: Impoverished environment

Geoff argued that coursebooks do not provide an adequate environment for learning, and are deficient in three ways:

Impoverished input: via short, safe ‘Sunday supplement’ texts. PARSNIPS (Politics, Alcohol, Religion, Sex, Narcotics, ...isms, Pork) are banned, meaning the input is unexciting and unrealistic.

Impoverished interaction: Exchanges take the classic IRF format (Initiation – Response – Feedback), which can lead to unrealistic exchanges such as:

T: What’s your job?
St: I’m a thief.
T: Good.

Impoverished output: These exchanges result in short, infrequent opportunities for the learners to contribute.

Problem 2: Learnability

The second problem concerns learnability, summarised in the slide below.

 
Problem 3: Quantity and Quality of Practice

In the scenario outlined above, the ‘I’ and the ‘F’ stages of I-R-F exchanges are controlled by the teacher, which reduces the amount of oral communicative practice available to learners to less than 20% of classroom time (Paul, 2003; Richards & Lockhart, 1994). This is particularly worrying in EFL contexts where opportunities for interaction in the Target Language outside class are limited.

Bearing these considerations in mind, Geoff feels that teachers do a remarkably good job of using and adapting coursebooks, but that the most efficient and effective was of addressing our learners’ needs is through TBLT, particularly the the version of TBLT proposed by Mike Long in the book Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching (2015), as Geoff put it ‘quite simply the best book ever written on language teaching’. The slide below, captured in a tweet by @adi_rajan outlines the principles espoused in this approach.

In this version of TBLT, learners’ needs are identified through Needs Analysis (NA) and participation is maximised via a series of specially designed Pedagogic Tasks (PTs). Input is directed at the point of need, through Focus on Form (FonF) rather than through coursebook-style Focus on Forms (FonFS – the additional ‘s’ is the important distinction, though somewhat confusing!). FonFS is the explicit teaching of a series of pre-determined grammar ‘McNuggets’ (Thornbury) within a synthetic, grammar-based syllabus, in other words, the format of most popular coursebooks.

Aware that the majority of teachers are working within certain institutional and curricular constraints, Geoff concluded with an appeal to practitioners to at least entertain doubt, about why and how they are working with coursebooks, summarised below:

References


Akbari, R. (2008) Postmethod Discourse and Practice. TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 4, pp. 641-652.

Bryfonski, L., & McKay, T. H. (2017) TBLT implementation and evaluation: A meta-analysis. Language Teaching Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168817744389

Paul, D. (2003) Teaching English to Children in Asia. Asia: Longman.

Long, M. H. (2015) Second Language Acquisition and Task-Based Language Teaching, Wiley Blackwell.

Nunan, D. (1999) Second Language Teaching and Learning. Heinle and Heinle.

Ortega, L. (2009) Sequences and Processes in Language Learning. In Long and Doughty Handbook of Language Teaching. Oxford, Wiley

Richards, J. and Lockhart, C. (1994) Reflective Teaching in Second Language Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Whong, M. Gil, K., Marsden, H.(2014) Beyond paradigm: The ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of classroom research. Second Language Research, 30,4.