Skip to main content

Textbooks revisited

The Schools Minsister Liz Truss and Sir Michael Wilshaw have been pushing for schools to make greater use of textbooks, Wilshaw even using the phrase "death by a thousand worksheets". I suppose they feel that textbooks are weightier and somehow more serious than worksheets. They assume textbooks are better.

My first response to this is that a book is just a collection of resources. If you bind together lots of worksheets you get a book. You might also argue that worksheets are more closely tailored to the needs of a particular class - this was certainly one reason I have produced my own resources over the years. I would also imagine that teachers may be more committed to teaching with their own carefully prepared materials than with imperfect ones produced by a publisher.

These days, in the field of modern languages, the quality of textbooks (or more strictly speaking course packages including worksheets, online materials, CDs etc) is variable. At A-level the quality is downright poor, I'm afraid, partly since books are now written with an ever greater focus on exams.

But I am not someone who for any pedagogical/philiosphical reason rejects textbooks outright. The argument should not be about textbooks versus worksheets, it should be about GOOD textbooks versus GOOD worksheets.

Now I understand why some teachers have a downer on textbooks. Books are not always good, some teachers use them too slavishly and with poor methodology, some have been poorly selected for a department. They seem expensive. It is also true that in some schools teachers cannot trust pupils to take them home or look after them properly.

However, to repeat, textbook is a collection of resources, part of a package of language learning materials which include a teacher's book, repromasters, recorded language and frequently online exercises. It has, in the best examples, been painstakingly pieced together, often refined over many years, to be a coherent, carefully graded, methodologically tried and tested learning resource. It is a reference book for pupils, a comfort blanket, a resource for overworked teachers to fall back on. It's a place where wheels need no reinventing. A fellow skilled professional has been paid to produce something of quality for you to use.

A good course book need not lead you into poor pedagogy and should be a launch pad for effective listening, oral practice, grammar and vocabulary building. It will be a good source of "comprehensible input", contain authentic sources and provide the teacher with creative ideas for lessons. It will come with a ready-made scheme of work.

It is true that course books and their peripherals are expensive, but when you begin to calculate the ongoing cost of duplicating worksheets and buying IT packages, and when you bear in mind course books should last at least five years, they may make good financial sense.

So, provided the course is well chosen - it's a real pain having to work with a book you do not like - and not used exclusively, no department should feel any shame in using a good textbook.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

The 2026 GCSE subject content is published!

Two DfE documents were published today. The first was the response to the consultation about the proposed new GCSE (originally due in October 2021) and the second is the subject content document which, ultimately, is of most interest to MFL teachers in England. Here is the link  to the document.  We are talking about an exam to be done from 2026 (current Y7s). There is always a tendency for sceptical teachers to think that consultations are a bit of a sham and that the DfE will just go ahead and do what they want when it comes to exam reform. In this case, the responses to the original proposals were mixed, and most certainly hostile as far as exam boards and professional associations representing the MFL community, universities, head teachers and awarding bodies are concerned. What has emerged does reveal some significant changes which take account of a number of criticisms levelled at the proposals. As I read it, the most important changes relate to vocabulary and the issue of topics

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,