As Alan Cuningsworth says, “Coursebooks make good servants, but poor masters.” But who is usually the master in the language classroom? The teacher or the coursebook? Ian McGrath joins us to discuss how coursebooks can be used, what affect they have on teacher autonomy and how teachers can make themselves the masters rather than servants.
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Coursebooks: Our Masters or Servants? (with Ian McGrath) Transcription
Ross Thorburn: Hi Ian, and thanks for joining us. I wanted to start off by asking you about the effect that materials can have on teachers' teaching skills.
You've got a section near the beginning of your book based around an argument from Jack Richards. I'll just quote to you from the bit from the book, "It's been argued that if teaching decisions are largely based on the textbook and the teacher's book, this has the effect of deskilling teachers." How much do you agree with that argument?
Ian McGrath: Well, I suppose it's a theoretical possibility, but I think that rests on two assumptions. That, for example, the teacher has certain skills to begin with which can be lost, and secondly, he or she loses them because they're not required in order to teach with this particular book.
I haven't seen any evidence to support this notion of skill loss, but I do think there's a real danger that teachers, let's say, who use the same book year in, year out do lose interest in the material. As a consequence, this loss of interest is communicated to the students.
I've observed a lot of teachers. It's fairly obvious that enthusiastic teachers can energize and motivate students, whereas bored teachers are likely to bore their students. Once teachers have been teaching the materials for so long that they've lost interest in them, there is a danger that they start to become boring.
Ross: I guess the thing that Jack Richards doesn't really mention there is teachers who maybe just never developed those skills in the first place.
Ian: That's a very good point.
Ross: Anyway, you've got another nice quote in the book from Cunningsworth, I think, which says, "Coursebooks make good servants but poor masters." In your experience, who usually is the master or the servant in the classroom, and why?
Ian: This takes us to teacher autonomy. It depends on the mindset and the professionalism of the teacher. The teacher has to see the coursebook as a servant, although actually I prefer tool, resource, one of the resources that can be used to bring about successful learning.
Ross: Going back to the Jack Richards' quote, "Coursebooks might deskill teachers or stop them from developing certain skills," can the coursebook also disempower teachers?
Ian: Going back to the Cunningsworth quote, if you accept the book as your master, then you disempower yourself. As a teacher, we have to remember that we also have relevant knowledge and experience that we can pass on to students, and students, themselves, have knowledge that they can share.
Why should we hand power over to the writer of a book who knows nothing about our students and their particular interests and needs?
Ross: I completely agree. As a teacher, you know your students, whereas the writers probably never set foot in the school and possibly never even been to the country that you're teaching in.
Does this also relate to the management of the school? I think, in some contexts, the power isn't given away by the teachers so much. It's maybe given away by the management, where managers maybe have placed a lot of faith -- probably too much faith -- in the writers of the coursebook. Have you seen that sort of thing before?
Ian: Yes, I have seen that situation. That reduces the motivation of the teachers, because they aren't free to do what they feel they should be doing. If teachers feel free to be responsive and creative, then that makes every class different.
Even if you're teaching the same 'teaching' -- I'm using this in inverted commas, as it were -- teaching the same material or, let's say, using the same material, you don't necessarily have to use it in exactly the same way with each class, because the class, itself, will be different.
Ross: Sometimes, nowadays, we see coursebooks that just have a huge amount of detail in the teacher's notes. I can personally remember using a teacher's book that virtually told you to stand up, walk across the room, pick up a pen before writing something on the whiteboard.
Do you think that going into a lot of detail in those teaching notes, is that useful help for novice teachers, or is it something that's more constricting for experienced teachers? How, as a coursebook writer, can you balance giving help to those different groups of teachers?
Ian: I don't blame teachers' books or publishers for this. They're obviously try to sell as many books as they can. There's a commercial motive, but I think the writers of these books are also trying to be helpful.
Teachers have very different levels of professional awareness. When you start out as a teacher, it's reassuring to be given a range of ready-made materials and suggestions for how to use them.
I started teaching without having had any training. For me, one of the teacher's books that I used was, in a sense, my trainer. By following the suggestions in the book, I felt more secure about what I was doing. Over time, I felt free to vary what I was doing.
It's a lot to do with experience. When you feel confident enough to select from what's being suggested, I think you will. I don't see the mass of detail procedures as an impediment to autonomy. For me, the suggestions are there to be used or not, depending on the teacher's own level of experience and confidence.
Ross: It's almost like the opposite of deskilling the teachers like we mentioned at the beginning, where if it's a good coursebook, then hopefully, it can act as a good example and almost like a teacher trainer for novice teachers.
That also means that, just as in teachers have to teach mixed ability classes and make the same materials work for both higher and lower-level students, the materials writers also have to write for mixed abilities of teachers.
Ian: I think so. With coursebooks, I'm thinking of, this is the core material, and then there are these possible branches off from this that you may choose to follow according to the needs, interests, capabilities of the class you're teaching.
It's clear to everyone what has to be done, in a sense, but not necessarily how it has to be done. Also, there are these branching possibilities which one may be able to follow, depending also on the amount of time available.
Coursebooks are also written with a certain number of teaching hours in mind. There's often an expectation, on the part of learners, as well as management, that you will get through the book, so teachers inevitably have to make decisions about what they can include and what they can't include.
Ross: Something else I wanted to ask you about was another nice quote about teachers finding that activities don't quite match their teaching style. You said in that situation, the teachers have a choice either to adapt the book or to adapt to the book. Do you want to tell us a bit about those options?
Ian: I think it was Rod Bolitho and Tony Wright who, at one point, used the term "teaching against the grain." The metaphor here is to the difficulty of cutting wood against the grain.
What they were trying to say is that, sometimes, we feel some discomfort with a particular coursebook text or an activity. That discomfort may be due to either the fact that we don't see ourselves teaching comfortably in that way, or in the case of a text, there are things in this text which don't suit culturally, let's say, the kind of group that we're working with.
Basically, we have a choice to adapt the materials or to teach them as they are. You can probably guess what my advice would be.
[laughter]
Ian: It would be to adapt the materials, but, at the same time, try to ensure that we don't lose sight of the intended learning outcome. We're trying to achieve the same, let's say, linguistic objective if it is a linguistic objective, but doing so using other materials or other means.
Ross: There is also a flip side to this though, where sometimes it's only by trying something that we think isn't going to work -- maybe from a coursebook, for example -- that we end up getting out of our routine, getting out of our comfort zone, and actually putting ourselves in a position to learn.
Ian: There may be a time and place for this. [laughs] If you're on a teacher training course, you may feel more comfortable experimenting with something than in your own class, where you're a bit concerned, if something should go wrong, about the consequences of that.
Again, going back to observation, it's good to encourage people to try out things in an observation that they haven't necessarily done before, because then, they have somebody present who can talk them through that experience and say, "Well, it was great. It was fantastic. You did it perfectly."
Encouraging them to do it again, or if it didn't work that well, to analyze why that was and how they might modify the approach to make it more effective the next time around.
Ross: Finally, as someone who's both a teacher, teacher trainer, coursebook writer, how do you go about using a coursebook?
Ian: My starting point is not the materials, themselves, but what I think, how was the course planned? I've set, possibly in negotiation with the students, what I think would be appropriate learning outcomes within the time available. Then I've chosen a coursebook or a set of materials that I feel will help me to accomplish those objectives.
Let's say I have just one coursebook. The first process is to select from those bits of the coursebook that will be directly helpful and useful, and to decide what I'm not going to use. Even where I have selected things, I might feel the need to adapt them in certain ways. One possibility, obviously, is to exploit the material to get more out of it.
If one takes the example of a text in the book, the text may be accompanied by a series of questions -- usually the case -- but I don't think one has to rely on the questions in the book.
One can get learners to talk about the topic of the text and their own experience in relation to it. If there are pictures, again, they can comment on those pictures, so that you're not necessarily using the material in the way that it's laid down. You are developing it in certain ways. You're exploiting it.
Sometimes, one might need to replace material in a book with one's own material because one feels that that's more relevant to students' needs, or even get learners to bring in materials, themselves. One almost always has to supplement what's provided because, as we said earlier, no textbook is going to be perfect for the particular group you're teaching.
You're likely to have to add certain things to it. It may be that more practice is needed of a particular point, or you feel the need to include more communicative activities in your course, and so on.