In this week’s seminar an ELT textbook writer came to talk to us about her work and we were able to ask a few questions and hear her insightful answers that reflected her many years of experience.
When we had been thinking about our principles and how we could see them informing any of our own potential ELT material design, we had mainly been concentrating on our own teaching experience and knowledge of learning theories and SLA as sources of information. It was enlightening to learn or be reminded that in the real world of materials publishing the first set of criteria to be met is determined by the publisher. These criteria are essentially of a practical nature – the publisher’s main concern is that the new product is popular and sells well. So the initial brief might be that the materials author produce something ‘conventional, generic’, something that appeals to as wide an audience as possible and nothing too ‘exciting or new’. In comparison to our rather idealistic principles informed by the latest pedagogical trends this does not sound very exciting but rather restrictive. However, being confronted with this reality drove the point home that materials design is not only or even not predominantly a creative process but instead about ‘business’.
Nevertheless the textbook writer confessed that overall she really enjoyed her work and that creativity did come into it. In fact, the challenge she seemed to relish most was to get from the point of creation, which in her words is ‘just like writing a lesson’, through the many often ‘tedious’ stages of editing, checks against other writers’ input and negotiations with the publisher to arrive at a product that you are proud of that, however, also fits the more restrictive criteria. Although it might feel frustrating to be unable to follow your ideals within the world of publishing, I can see that meeting the challenge of marrying business with education is a distinctive and valuable skill and rewarding in its own right. It seems that the main traits you need are openness (to listen to other peoples’ ideas), flexibility (to meet the diverse needs of publishers, teachers and learners), conviction and belief in yourself and your ideas, determination to fight the battles worth fighting for (against publishers?) and a thick skin. Interestingly, our writer also said that a ‘big ego’ does not help in textbook design: you do not get credited for all your hard work other than receiving a paycheck at the end.
In response to our questions we found out a lot about the process of and current trends in materials design. For example, a lot of the language used in a textbook now gets drawn from or at least checked against corpora of written and spoken English. This seems to indicate that there is now an interest in teaching language as it is used in the real world (granting that technological advances in recent years were a prerequisite which made the compiling of real language samples and access to the resulting corpora possible). In the case of English most of the corpora used in this way are compilations of native-speaker language samples. However, ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) corpora are beginning to exist (e.g. VOICE) and might inform (parts of) future textbooks of English.
Another trend is that of ‘UK-centricity dying out’. According to our textbook author, publishers do not want lots of information and references to Britain and its culture anymore but instead aim for products that have an international appeal (e.g. no UK celebrities). She admitted that she had found it difficult at first to ‘get rid of her cultural baggage’ but that over time she got good at spotting ‘cultural bias’. I am sure that this is the case, but I also wonder how achievable this really is when all coursebook designers working on a package together are in fact British and working in Britain? This is probably why publishers sometimes give the option of editing a textbook package to suit the country they are selling to…
To end with our textbook writer pointed to the fact that throughout her time as a materials designer she also worked as a teacher and always welcomed the opportunity to reconnect with the profession after times of immersion in materials design. In her opinion materials writers should be (recent) teachers and never lose touch with the reality of the classroom. I couldn’t agree more! It is easy to forget very quickly what it actually feels like to teach and I cannot imagine that you can possibly come up with effective lessons from an outsider’s perspective.
Hello Alex,
Very interesting post. I thought that having the opportunity to talk with an actual materials writer just after evaluating her coursebook was very stimulating and I wish we had had more time for it. I was particularly impressed when she told us that she had taught EFL for five hours that morning as I had always imagined materials writers as some sort of celebrities that work from their ivory towers and don’t get their hands dirty with teaching anymore. An interesting point that she underlined and that you have reported in your post is the fact that the UK-centricity of books is dying out and I’m wondering if that’s a good trend or not. When I was studying English, I was really interested in British culture and that was probably the biggest single drive for my motivation. I have the feeling that if coursebooks become culturally neutral, they will also risk to become boring and dull.
Hi Andrea,
Thanks for your comment! I agree with you when you say that making coursebooks culturally neutral could result in them becoming boring. But from my point of view the answer is not to make them more about the UK (or another native speaker country or Western culture). For me the problem is the global coursebook itself. How can anyone possibly predict what the individuals that make up this massive international audience are really concerned about or interested in? I think the message a coursebook gives in the end is ‘I am the coursebook, i.e. I am an/the authority, this is what you should be interested in and this will work best for you to learn this new language’. It’s probably the context I have been working in which has made me that suspect of coursebooks and which has essentially allowed me to have a lot of freedom where materials are concerned. That freedom has invariably resulted in a lot of hard work. But in this one-to-one, homestay context there would not have been any other choice for me.
You also say that you were always quite happy to learn about the UK. So was I! But we’ve ended up living here so we were probably interested in this culture anyway. How many of your classmates have emigrated or have chosen to have any substantial connection to the UK (maybe in their jobs?)? Would they have been as interested as you in UK culture?
Given what you say in this reply to Andrea you’d really enjoy some of John Gray’s work, see:
Gray, J. (2010) The Construction of English: Culture, Consumerism and Promotion in the ELT Global Coursebook. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gray, J. (2012) English the industry. In: Hewings, A. & Tagg, C. (eds). The Politics of English: Conflict, Competition, Co-existence. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 137-178.
Gray, J. (ed) (2013) Critical Perspectives on Language Teaching Materials. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
I agree with you on the fact that many people might not be interested in the UK culture and in British English. I have always been a bit of an Anglophile so I suppose that my experience might not be that relevant. Actually, your reply has made me think and has reminded me of a couple of episodes from when I was living in in Italy. In Milan I had a few friends in the British expat community and some of them were English teacher. One of them was working for a language school on one-to-one business English courses and one of the students complained about the fact that the tutor was English since she was more interested in America and on the American accent…
However, I still think that making the topics of coursebooks generic and neutral is not the solution. If the content of a coursebook is boring and dull, then language becomes the main focus the lessons and content becomes only a means to teach language. However, it should actually be the opposite as language is a meaningless and dry instrument without content. I think that the CLIL (content and language integrated learning) approach might be a way to address this problem, but I must admit that I haven’t read much about it so I’m not sure how effective it is.
Hi Andrea,
I have just had another thought to do with the whole language/culture connection. I agree that if we take culture out of coursebooks they become too neutral and boring. On the other hand I see a need to make English less about Britain and the US, the English language having become a ‘tool’ for international communication. But what if it’s not just about the cultural aspects of topics but if we think of culture being part of the very fabric of the language itself: the vocabulary that has come from so many different sources especially in the case of English or the fact that gender finds different expression in different languages (why is there no gender in English or why is the moon feminine in Italian and French and masculine in German?) or the way language can actually show us how phenomena are conceptualised differently (a very silly example but ‘half eight’ means 8:30 in English and 7:30 in German – it confuses me and my children no end!)? So even if you make topics more neutral you cannot actually completely get rid of ways different languages structure reality in different ways. Maybe making topics more neutral has just taken our attention off the way culture enters language at a much deeper level? Apart from that I still don’t see how British materials writers can decide what is culturally neutral. Although I am sure that certain topics are more obviously culturally biased than others I believe that it is only in discussion with our students from different nationalities and cultures that we can find real common ground, topics that concern us all as global citizens and fellow human beings. I think rather than taking culture out of language teaching we should work together with our students to make it more transparent, to notice culture by comparing different concepts behind our languages and by exploring our different, potentially culturally coloured ways of interpreting topics.