Guest speaker Theresa Clementson
It was a great surprise to meet a publisher after just doing a pre-evaluation of her book.
So many questions ran through my head;
-What principles did she follow?
-Did it come from her as a teacher and a writer of from publishers?
-How did she come up with a particular lexis for certain level and lesson?
-Did she try out all the activities before including them in the course book?
-How does she start to write the unit?
-What does she start from?
-Why there weren’t as much rise of cultural awareness as in other course books?
Of course, you don’t become a material writer overnight. It requires years of experience and the best material writers are the practicing teachers as they don’t lose the touch with level, students’ needs, they are aware of what learners are interested in, what they are into and what motivates them.
Material designing it’s very complicated process involving more than one person to write, limited time , budget, a publishing company with it’s own restrictions and requirements, learning how to compromise or sometimes fight your corner.
When we asked Theresa which principles she followed when writing English Unlimited , the answer was: interesting. It is what we all try to do when supplementing or creating our own lessons, we try to make it interesting, appealing to our students, motivating , using different methods and technics to deliver the target topic, grammar and etc. I guess if to put all the main principles, in a nutshell, we come up with: interesting, it’s just a shorter way to describe all these principles.
When evaluating ‘English Unlimited’ I’ve noticed the lack of “UK centric things”. The idea was to write a global course book, something real, international, not dated, without using local celebrities’ names, correctly selected lexis, written for being used by adults.
Being an L2 learner myself, I remember how it was irrelevant to me talking about celebrities or shows I didn’t know but I felt more engaged in the activities based on educational topics.
Writing a global course book you have to be very selective when choosing a topic and it’s easier to write for adults as they have more general knowledge and experience. However, it’s
Theresa is not only a professional writer but also an experienced and practicing teacher. It is crucial for material designers to practice in order to not lose the touch with the level and students.
Theresa has also written a version of “English Unlimited” for Arab speaking countries. It is quite common that a lot of countries cannot use global coursebooks due to their religious beliefs and regulations and usually ends up using a local coursebook, which can be a great book but it might be a bit isolating and restricted.
Writing a global course book yet requires bearing in mind your learners, e.g writing a coursebook for Arab speaking countries or European countries(Theresa has mentioned an interesting fact about keeping units short in a course book as Italian learners get upset if they don’t finish all the units),meeting their expectation and needs, and don’t forget about the publisher’s requirements.