A community is multilingual or largely monolingual may affect the extent to which L2 learning is seen as a valuable activity or how ‘language aware’ learners might be.

(Hall 2018; 203)

China is a monolingual country where English is a compulsory subject in the primary and secondary education. Apparently, the environment for language learning is largely provided by the classroom, where teaching practices are framed by curriculum and supposed to embody the broader national policies and values. Therefore, the materials, which are delivered by coursebooks assigned by the governmental institutions, paralleled with teachers’ pedagogical approaches appear to be the main resources available providing learners with language input and opportunities for language output. In this case, to what extent English learning is valuable and how language aware learners might be could largely depend on the stakeholders’ experience and perceptions of using course books.

The course books currently used in my city are officially allocated by the provincial government. Teachers, even schools have no rights to choose them. The design of these books adopts communicative approach with 4 skills integrated. These are in line with the ultimate goal of developing an overall ability in language use advocated by the updated national curriculum standards. The overall ability includes 5 components: knowledge of the language; skills in using the language; cultural understanding; affective and cognitive development. These components are embedded in the contents and activities in the units of a total of 11 books in senior high school stage, among which are 8 required ones and 3 electives. The design of the course book empowers administers to “achieve credibility, timetable lesson and standardized teaching.” (Tomlinson 2012: 158)

Despite the fact that the course book provides teachers and learners with secure, systematic, progressive and revisable resources and the principles of the design are approved of by teachers, there are common complaints from teachers and learners about the tasks, out-of-date content, and the language used in the textbooks. Firstly, from teachers’ perspective, the senior high school in China is designed to prepare students for higher education by getting high marks in the national entrance examinations, in which speaking is not included and the emphasis is on the vocabulary and grammar. To meet the needs for scoring high in exams, teachers tend to abandon the communicative activities or modify them in the light of the standardized exam paper. Thus, majorities of the tasks in the course books cannot be made effective use of to develop the learners’ overall abilities but changed to enhance exam skills. Learners’ experience of learning English is almost all about ticking the right one from 4 choices, which could possibly be boring and therefore demotivate learners when they don’t fully realize the value of the language for mutual communication by expressing themselves and listening to others.

     the contents of a course book 

Besides, although the topics cover different cognitive and affective aspects of life, the content remains the same for more than 10 years, some of which are obsolete. For example, a unit touches on Olympic Games and the content is about Chinese people expecting 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Consequently, teachers usually replace the reading text with supplement updating materials to arouse students’ interest. It is also argued by teachers and learners that the topics with the language use hardly facilitate real-life communication because few units present the topics directly relevant to learners’ everyday life. Therefore, students are less exposed to such target language and culture as travelling, casual chatting, ordering food etc together with manners and behaviour. Additionally, materials are not authentic, which does not prepare learners for the reality of language use outside the classroom. For example, the speed of the listening material is too slow and there seems no connected speech, which rarely happens in real communication. Idioms, chunks and collocations don’t get enough attention which they should have. Due to the deficiencies of the course books, it is not surprising that students feel as if they had never learnt English because they hardly understand the people from English-speaking countries in natural surroundings.

As I believe language is a medium for information and communication, in the future, I will endeavour to evaluate, select and adapt materials which can facilitate students’ real language learning by addressing their discourse competence. I also believe with the teacher’s proper pedagogy, a linear relationship exists between language competence and grades in exams. Therefore, I expect I will have known the principles and frameworks of evaluating and adapting materials and have been able to apply these into practice by the end of the module. What’s more, according to Tomlinson (2012: 143), materials are “…anything that can be used to facilitate the learning of a language”. In today’s class, when the tutor presented a small cubic block and asked what teachers could do with it in the language class. I was surprised that almost all the teachers except me came up with many interesting and useful ideas, which inspired me to explore more materials creatively. Therefore, I expect to learn more about how materials other than course books facilitate learning.

I would like to end my first blog by quoting Howatt’s view on communication: “Talking is a natural capacity. You need: “someone to talk to, something to talk about, and a desire to understand and to make yourself understood (2004: 210).” I hope the future materials in my context will help address these needs.

References:

Howatt, A. P. R. & Widdowson, H. G. (2004) A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hall, G. 2018, Exploring English language teaching: language in action, Second edn, Routledge, London.

Tomlinson, B. (2012) State-of-the-Art Article: Materials development for language learning and teaching. Language Teaching 45 (2): pp.143-179.