User:Charles Jeffrey Danoff/Heading for a Learner-Centered Textbook

''This essay was written for my class L539: Language Foundations for ESL/EFL Teachers. I believe I did a poor job of writing, but posted it as an experiment. Please feel free to edit at will and/or raise comments or concerns in the discussion page. The original version of this document is available here.''

HEADING FOR A LEARNER- CENTERED TEXTBOOK

Charles Jeffrey Danoff

Indiana University

American Headway from Oxford University Press is a textbook designed for students learning English. This paper will critique the effectiveness of Chapter 2 "The way we live". The paper begins outlining the stated aims of the textbook, then gives examples of how those aims are achieved while evaluating them, explores its underlying assumptions and concludes with some suggestions.

Aims

The aims of the chapter are spelled out right under its title on page ten:

* Present tenses - 5 questions

* have - 1 question

* Collocation - daily life - 3 questions

* Making conversation - 7 questions

Note: Counting the "Starter" on page 10 as one question, there are 18 in the chapter.

Beyond those explicit aims, the chapter questions focus on speaking, writing and listening English. Excluding one unclear (asks students to go to another page) query the breakdown in focus is as follows:

* 9 Writing questions

* 7 Speaking questions

* 3 Listening questions

Some questions involve two skills at once, and I counted them in one for each category. Listening questions had to involve some textbook based recording. The obvious exception is reading. There are no questions that focus on students honing their reading skills. There is not a lot of prose for students to read. Question 1 on page ten does have some short paragraphs, but they are not testing the students ability to read and comprehend, they test the student's knowledge of the present tense and their ability to match.

Another aim of the chapter is to develop student's awareness of the cultures of the countries that speak English natively.

Questions to Achieve the Aims and their Success or Failure

Present

The first present tense question on page ten is a simple exercise where the students are asked to match the correct word with a blank one in a sentence. To figure out the answer the students needs to either know the syntactical rules or understand what the meanings of the sentence and the words. For example, "This country ___ wine and wool-it has more than 60 million sheep!" The choices are exports, enjoy, immigrants and huge. Either the student can figure that enjoy and huge do not work because the word has to end in "-s" and then deduce its not immigrants because the word must be a verb, so it has to be exports; or, they could simply deduce it has to be exports, because its clearly the only word that logically fits.

I believe that in this question its too easy for students to find the answer logically, without actually practicing the present tense at all. Therefore, I find this question ineffective.

Another present tense question on page twelve is also quite simple. Question three practices the present continuous by having students talk with a partner about two things "Are you ..." and "Is she/he ...". A model is given "I'm sitting down and I'm working very hard. My teacher's laughing!" The students are to follow the model and then insert different verbs pertaining to themselves. This question is too obvious, the ways in which students can or could be using the present continuous. Its their only option, I think it might be more effective for

have

There is a question about "have" on page twelve. Question two asks the student to ask a partner whether they have or do not have things like a cell phone or credit card. It also has them speak about what others have, "sister/brother have a boyfriend/girlfriend?" Like the ones above I believe this is far too easy.

Collocation - daily life

On page thirteen there is a vocabulary section all about daily life. The first two questions are about collocation, having the students first match like verbs and nouns "have / breakfast" and then match those pairs with the correct room in the house "Kitchen, Bathroom, Living room, Bedroom". Scaffolding that knowledge students then use that information to write about their daily life. I find these questions to be really successful, especially, because they build naturally. They start off easy and then the students use what they have learned in a more difficult way.

Making conversation

There are multiple points where students should try to make conversation. I believe the best comes in question 4 of the Daily life Vocabulary section on page thirteen. Students are asked to "Describe your favorite room to a partner." It gives them a lot more freedom with what to say and challenges them to think unlike most of the rest of the chapter, which has fairly straightforward conversational questions like number 6 on page 13 which models questions students should ask, which likely will cause them to only ask those questions.

Writing

The writing questions vary from one word answers (question 1 on page 10), to writing sentences (question 4 on page 12) writing short paragraphs (question 3 on page 13). All of them give the students a strong model to base their writing on, making it easy for the students to know how to answer and not having them think too much.

Speaking

The speaking questions give students opportunities to use different parts of speech in directed ways, to have short conversations. Some are simple phrases like question 3 on page 12, while others like question 4 on page 13 have them using speech to try and gain information in a complex way. Overall and this question in particular make the speaking questions superior to the writing ones, because the students have more freedom.

Listening

I do not have access to the tapes, so I it is difficult evaluate the listening portions of the chapter, but my guess is they would be very similar to the written examples in the text and the conversations would follow the mold of what other questions try to get the students saying.

Culture

I find the cultural aspect of the chapter to be quite silly and ineffective because it tries to be too general. The Starter question on is nice because it lets students learn specifically about each country, but beyond that most of the cultural information is really general and un-engaging. The pictures on page twelve in particular are not specific and add nothing to the other parts of the text.

Underlying Assumptions

I feel this chapter is mostly organized on the underlying assumption of textbook-centered learning, similar to a teacher-centered classroom. Some of it is more student-centered, as Anton describes occurring in the classroom allowing students to "engage in negotiation with their teachers" (1999, p. 315). This is similar to what happens in the textbook with activities like the four Vocabulary questions on page 13. They start by getting the students familiar with the vocabulary in a reduced way (questions 1 and 2), directing them and then allowing them freedom to use it (questions 3 and 4) in a way that challenges them to think. This roughly follows the scaffolding metaphor Wood, Bruner & Ross (1976, as cited in Anton 2004, p. 305) created.

I feel this is far superior to most of the chapter which is textbook-centered allowing very little student freedom like all the questions on page 12 that force the students to only use the language in a way the teacher has directed. This leads to a lack of engagement like the teacher-centered classroom (Anton 1999 p. 315).

Conclusion

To improve, the chapter should engaged the students more. To do that, I believe this chapter should try to be more specific in its aims and cultural content, while giving the students more freedom. Instead of trying to explicitly address four aims as stated on page ten, just have one. This will make it easier for the students to be aware of and take ownership over what they are learning. Similarly, instead of exploring the cultures of many different countries as a context for the chapter, just focus on one in more depth, I believe this would be yield far more interesting topics. Finally, the whole chapter should follow the question model from page 13 that scaffolds in a learner-centered way instead of just having it at the end.

References

American Headway. Oxford University Press.

Anton, M. (1999). The discourse of a learner-centered classroom: Sociocultural perspectives on teacher-learner interaction in the second-language classroom. The Modern Language Journal, 83 (3), 303 – 318.

Wood, D., Bruner, J.S., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry, 17, 89 – 100.