i’m an ardent believer in the "Side By Side "series. i think beginning adult students benefit greatly from it and i get upset when a school hands me some bad jaio tchai that they’re just selling the students.
how could a series be better than side by side? i mean, you’ve got Bill Bliss, one of the TOP illustrator/ cartoonists in the US doing the drawings, plus the US government uses Side by Side for immigrant classes.
i’ve never had any trouble with the book. and i’ve got all kinds of ways to use it. it fills an hour and a half to 2 hours nicely and there is never any “dead time” that you have to fill with stuff pulled out of your own brain on the spur of the moment.
i’ve taught the whole series , and when i grow up and get my own adult school, it’ll be the only book i use, except for mid level/to advanced students.
“kong zong english” and “let’s talk” just don’t cut the mustard.
I tried to use the side by series but got bored and gave up. Boredom is a major theme here. Bored and boring. You bore me and I’ll bore you. Never say what you think unless it is an insult. English should be fun and easy always and require no time or imagination. Analysis is OK as long as it is faulty. Anything else and there is something wrong with the teacher.
Side by Side is fine as a supplemental book. It is not a good main text book.
Plus, SbS is written with ESL programs in the US in mind. It is not adjusted for experience and needs of Taiwanese adults. In terms of relevance and personalization, a teacher definitely needs to modify and adapt the activities.
But SbS is good in that it provides communicative practices that nicely complement a main coursebook that is lacking in interaction, particularly for less experienced teachers or those with less timeto prepare more relevant activities.
that’s what i mean exactly. yiu know, TW students are infamous for making the class a one way street. as long as you have plenty of activities for them to do, AB practice (groups of two) workbooks, etc. they get the things they need and you fill the time nicely. hate to say it, but filling time is an issue for me, but i want to do it with CONTENT not fluff. SBS helps me do that and see improvement from the basic level at least.
that’s what i mean exactly. you know, TW students are infamous for making the class a one way street, which can cause embarrasing dead time and headaches. as long as you have plenty of activities for them to do, AB practice (groups of two) workbooks, etc. they get the things they need and you fill the time nicely. hate to say it, but filling time is an issue for me, but i want to do it with CONTENT not fluff. SBS helps me do that and see improvement from the basic level at least.
Side by Side has most of the deficiencies of most standard textbooks. Structural syllabus, two-dimensional characters, a poverty of input. Having said this, it’s not significantly worse than most other textbooks. And I can see that the simplicity makes it fairly easy to work with.
I like the Cambridge Touchstone series. Well, I’m not wildly enthusiastic about any textbooks, but these do a pretty good job. The thing that distinguishes them is the use of corpus data. Students get a reasonable feel for the most common structures and phrases in (American) spoken English.
i’ve taught SBS for so many years i feel naked without it. but yeah, it’s not perfect.
i’m just so nervous in front of a class unless i know the time can be filled competently. have you guys ever used a text only to have non responsive students turn all your prep for a two hour class into 30 minutes of material and you have AN HOUR AND A HALF TO FILL??? it’s scary.
i hate to degrade such an honorable profession down to filling time, but if you can’t even fill the time, you won’t be working.
like i said, i do the prep, but it’s the one sided thing(teacher crams my brain, i recieve) that kills it.
Personally, I found SBS to have about 60% useful content. Headway to have about 70% and more complete in a whole approach to language learning. Headway is more useful if students are serious about learning something and not just filling in time and playing games because there is nothing better to do.
I’m sorry, but SBS is just as useless as any other stupid, half arsed textbook available in Taiwan.
Like every other book, it is designed for Mexican immigrants hopping over the border rather than being geared towards professional or semi-professional Taiwanese students who (feel) they want to further their English. There is nothing “relative” to Taiwanese culture or viewpoints in the book at all and quite frankly, it’s just a complete waste of tropical rainforest.
I gave up on books a long time ago and I prepare my very own material for the very few classes I teach every week. So what - I havn’t got the top illustrator in the US to illustrate for me, but my content is far better than that which can be found in SBS.
[quote=“theposter”]i’ve never seen Headway. can i get it at Caves?[/quote]While you’re there, have a look at the Touchstone series. Read the bit in the front of the teachers’ books about how they’ve used the corpus data. That’s one of the few genuine innovations in textbooks in the last decade or so.
Headway’s alright. It has similar limitations to most other textbooks (such as covering all the most common uses of “like” within one chapter) but at least the listening and reading material is fairly interesting and can lead to some good follow-up work.
The “English Conversation in Taiwan” series by Michael Yeldham is Taiwan specific and is the best set of conversation textbooks that I’ve used for group classes. Crane is the publisher.
The “English Conversation in Taiwan” series by Michael Yeldham is Taiwan specific and is the best set of conversation textbooks that I’ve used for group classes. Crane is the publisher.[/quote]
If it’s the series that Caves has wisely put on the very top shelf (so high that even I, at 5’7", had to stand on my tiptoes on the stepstool in order to reach it), I thought it was a little anemic in content and intelligence. I didn’t really care for what I saw.
I have used some of the activities from Touchstone, but my students really liked the ones in Gear Up. The only downside of Gear Up is that there are only two books and they are both at the same level - mid-intermediate. They complement Interchange 3rd edition nicely and build on the topics presented. They preteach the vocabulary and teach collocations rather than grammar. It is almost strictly a conversation program and they even have graphic organizers for students to plan their conversations as well as discourse markers in the back to help give the students more natural language when they talk. Gear Up is also available in Caves bookstore although I don’t recall them having the teacher’s manual there which would have the complete audio CD.
And Side by Side was so bad when I was doing my teaching practicum in university, even my professor advised to use them sparingly and led us to the Interchange books instead (and that was when the 2nd edition had just been published).
By the way, I have some of my adult books for sale - Touchstone, Downtown, Interchange 3rd Edition, and two more - all level 1/Intro. All for a fair price!
[quote=“ImaniOU”]I have used some of the activities from Touchstone…[/quote]The activities in Touchstone are comparable to those in other textbooks. So OK but not great. I don’t know of any textbook that offers adequate cyclic progression from sufficient comprehensible meaning-bearing input through to interactive communicative tasks. As with most textbooks, if you want to make a really good job of it you have to develop your own activities.
There are two very good things about Touchstone, but you only get the benefit if you follow the course consistently. There’s the fact that the linguistic syllabus is based on corpus data. And there’s the related focus of the course (and the set oral tests) on conversational strategies.
