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Materials in ELT: Current Issues

作者简介

Sue Garton is Director of Postgraduate Programmes in English at Aston University, UK, where she tutors on postgraduate programmes in TESOL. She has written and edited books and articles for teachers including From Experience to Knowledge in ELT with Julian Edge and Professional Encounters in TESOL with Keith Richards.

Kathleen Graves is Associate Professor of Education Practice at the University of Michigan, USA. She has written and edited books and articles on curriculum development including Teachers as Course Developers, Designing Language Courses: A Guide for Teachers, and, with Lucilla Lopriore, Developing a New Curriculum for School Age Learners.

 

In the wake of critical approaches to TESOL (see, for example, Block, Gray and Holborow, 2012; Edge, 2006) global coursebooks have also come under more critical scrutiny. At its most basic this can be seen in the open acknowledgement that global publishing is a multi-million pound business (Masuhara and Tomlinson, 2008), a realisation that is often something of a surprise to graduate students and teachers. Masuhara and Tomlinson (2008) point out that, in an attempt to maximise profits, global coursebooks for general English are aimed at the dual markets of language courses in English-speaking countries and in English as a Foreign language contexts. The result is that they may not satisfy the needs of learners and teachers in either (Masuhara et al., 2008: 310) and al Majthoob (Chapter 4) makes a strong case for materials that reflect different realities.

 

Tomlinson (2008) even goes so far as to assert that coursebooks are at least partly to blame for the failure of learners to learn in that they conform to the expectations of stakeholders and the demands of the market rather than to what we know about language acquisition and the learning process. Underlying Tomlinson’s criticism are pedagogical premises, which still view materials as ‘curriculum artefacts’ (Apple and Christian-Smith, 1991: 4 as cited in Gray, 2010: 2). However, Gray (2010, 2012), building on the work of critical applied linguists such as Pennycook (1994) and Phillipson (1992, 2009) makes a compelling case for considering the global coursebook as a cultural artefact which presents a particular view of reality and is value laden.

 

The values portrayed by coursebooks are also inscribed in the methodological approaches they adopt (Prodromou and Mishen, 2008). Global coursebooks tend to be based on approaches developed in western academic departments, exhibiting what Prodromou and Mishen (2008: 194) call ‘methodological correctness’.

 

However, in spite of criticisms, teachers and learners themselves may generally view global coursebooks favourably, albeit with a healthy lack of idealism (Yakhontova, 2001; Zacharias, 2005). This is far from the view of teachers and learners as unquestioning consumers, which sometimes seems to emerge from more critical approaches to materials.

 

An alternative to the global coursebook lies in books that are produced for specific countries or regions. In some cases these are local versions of global books; in others they are books written especially for a particular country, either by ‘experts’ from English-speaking countries, or by local writers, or in collaboration. The solution in China has been to use cooperation between local education departments, local publishers, overseas publishers and textbook writers (Hu, 2005).

 

However, these books do not necessarily address the issues raised above in relation to global coursebooks. Moreover, the approach taken to culture is one of a critical information-giving, which does little to develop the intercultural awareness needed by learners who are more likely to be using English to communicate with other ‘non-native speakers’ than with ‘native speakers’. As Graves and Garton note (Chapter 16) ‘localising content enables learners to talk and write about their own experiences, concerns and culture through English’. Producing local textbooks that do not reflect local contexts seems like a missed opportunity to promote positive attitudes towards both local culture and English.

 

However, local publishers can also have a positive influence on their global counterparts. Prodromu and Mishen (2008) look at the example of Greece as what they call (ibid.: 203) ‘an interesting example of the local determining the global, the periphery fighting back against the centre’. In response to local demands, Greek publishers produced coursebooks that introduced a stronger form-focused element, which was not only more suited to local ‘cultures of learning’ (Jin and Cortazzi, 2006) but also went some way to reinstating practices that had long fallen out of favour, such as use of the L1 and grammar explanations. As a result, this ‘hybrid’ approach has now become the norm in materials published for the Greek market.

 

It is worth noting that such hybrid practices have probably always been very much alive in the majority of English classrooms around the world, as teachers adapted global materials to their own contexts (see Humphries, Chapter 15; Seferaj, Chapter 6). However, at least with the advent of more hybrid practices in published coursebooks, such practices can again be considered respectable.

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Global vs. Local: Does It Matter?

作者简介

Mario López-Barrios is Professor of Foreign Language Teaching at the School of Languages, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. His research interests include second language acquisition, materials development, and research methods in applied linguistics.

 

Elba Villanueva de Debat teaches EFL Methodology at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. She served as ACPI President (Córdoba EFL Teachers’ Association). She has presented at conferences in Latin America, Europe, and the USA. Her research interests include materials development and teacher education.

 

Distinctive features of local and localised materials

We identify four aspects that distinguish local and localised materials from international ones: contextualisation, linguistic contrasts, intercultural reflection, and facilitation of learning. In characterising the distinguishing features we refer to both the presence of the category (as in conformity with the theoretical framework) and its absence (as in the distance between the theoretical category and the actual presence in the local and localised coursebooks). In the following sections we discuss each feature in turn.

 

Contextualisation

Contextualisation involves three aspects: personalisation, content topics included in the materials, and pedagogical fit. Personalisation implies primarily ‘connecting coursebooks to the real world which the learners live in’ (Tomlinson, 2003b: 171). One way of contextualising the coursebook is the inclusion of local references, such as familiar personalities, places, facts, and folklore among others.

 

Also, content subject matter covered by local and localised coursebooks should be sensitive to the sociocultural norms of the society where they are implemented. Today this is less of an issue in Argentina as there is a general tendency to discuss virtually any topic, albeit this may be less so in religious schools. Despite the current open attitude to controversial topics, local and localised coursebooks – which are almost exclusively used in schools – largely tend to avoid them.

 

Pedagogical fit, the third aspect of contextualisation, refers to the degree of harmony between a coursebook with educational practices that suit the local teaching context and its conformity to a country’s school curriculum. In our analysis of two localised coursebooks (López Barrios and Villanueva de Debat, 2006) we mention the agreement of these books with the foreign languages curriculum in effect at the time of publication.

 

Linguistic contrasts

Linguistic contrasts focus on the opportunity to make learners reflect on the form, meaning, and use of the target language linguistic features by encouraging contrastivity. Despite the considerable amount of evidence reported in Second Language Acquisition scholarship regarding the positive impact of language awareness from a contrastive viewpoint, coursebooks do not respond, or only do so to a very restricted degree.

 

As regards the distinction between international, local and localised coursebooks, the intended learners’ L1 is an issue of interest. Courtillon (2003) contends that speakers of a language related to the target language – such as speakers of Romance and Germanic languages learning English – will profit from a coursebook that encourages learners to look for cross-linguistic similarities. Likewise, students whose L1 is more distant, for example in terms of morphological typology or writing systems as in Chinese, would need a coursebook that helps them explore these differences. The inclusion of such linguistic contrasts is feasible in local and localised coursebooks, but goes against the very notion of international coursebooks.

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Adapting Materials to Meet the Literacy Needs of Young Bahraini Learners

作者简介

Sahar al Majthoob is the Head of the Languages and Humanities Section at the Curricula Directorate in the Ministry of Education in Bahrain. She started her career as an English teacher then moved to the field of curriculum. She supervises and participates in the materials selection and development. Her interests include first and second language literacy processes.

 

Initial adaptation of EFL materials to provide literacy support for Bahraini learners

In order to address the needs of Bahraini learners, ministerial committees were set up to adapt the materials used in schools. Changes were driven by the results of classroom observations, teachers’ views, and comments from parents. The committees included teachers, senior teachers, curriculum specialists, educational supervisors, and the publisher’s resident teacher trainer who was, in addition to training, in charge of working out the adaptations and liaising with the editorial team to get them done. Each grade level had a separate committee, but they all shared some of the members from curriculum and educational supervision directorates in the Ministry, in addition to the teacher trainer. The members were selected carefully to make sure that informed adaptations were made. My role in the committees changed over time from being a member to leading the teams and doing the final revisions of the needed adaptations. The initial phase focused mainly on screening the materials to guarantee cultural appropriateness and took place before the materials were used in the classroom. The second phase was concurrent with the actual implementation of the materials. Committees would suggest adaptations, or approve them based on classroom observations, meetings with teachers and senior teachers, feedback from teachers who used the materials, and members of the committee. The committee then submitted a table of the suggested adaptations that was sent to the publisher. It has to be noted that the editorial team was very cooperative, reflective in looking at the adaptations, and made suggestions that were found to be more effective in several cases. The process of adaptation continued to the year following, when the new activities were tested in class to verify their effectiveness. The third phase was done after using the series in the classrooms for Grades 1–3.

 

Including more literacy work in the EFL materials

Originally, there was a recurrent section called Find, draw, and write that focused on identifying an object or character, drawing it, and labelling the drawing using the given words, as shown in Figure 4.1. It was changed after discussions within the Ministry and collaboration with the publisher to create a section called Think about English, to include strategies related to literacy. For example, the activity in Figure 4.2 helps students learn print convention strategies by recognising the use of a capital letter at the beginning of the sentences and the use of a full stop at the end. It presents a good start to learning the mechanics of writing.

 

 

In another Think about English activity students are asked to circle the sentences in a paragraph. This helps students recognise sentence boundaries and that paragraphs are made up of sentences. Every sentence makes a whole unit of meaning, with a beginning marked by a capital letter and an end marked by a full stop. At a higher level, one of the Think about English activities asks students to circle the adjectives in a list of sentences such as, ‘She’s got long black hair.’ This type of activity focuses on strategies related to identifying parts of speech, in this case for children to identify adjectives as words that describe nouns. This is a typical activity in first and second language learners’ materials which is useful for foreign language learners too. At this age children are engaged in many activities where they have to describe or talk about personal things or pictures in a story. It helps them to engage in speaking activities like show and tell.

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