Text book difficulties

A little while back I gave a test from the teacher’s book to my Jr High kids. One of the questions was to think of another item in the same category as the examples given.

For instance, if you see car, bus, and motorbike then you have to think of another means of transport.

The examples given were mushroom, and two vegetables. The answer key specified that the answer should be ‘another vegetable’, but one of my kids argued that mushroom is not a vegetable therefore any food should be acceptable.

He’s right, so he got his grade revised.

What do you do when books teach stuff - not language, but general education - that you believe to be incorrect? Any other examples?

On a more language-related note, I came across a book a while back that named a whole bunch of farm animals - horse, chicken, cow, and hog. Why couldn’t they just say ‘pig’? At that level it’s confusing for students and serves no useful purpose.

Isn’t there some standard list of names for things somewhere that language book writers have to refer to? If not, why not? It’s bad enough with differences between all the flavours of English but when people go around introducing additional complications that’s just plain silly.

A drawing of a monkey with a tail. The book says chimp. The plural is chimpanzees. I scribbled it out and wrote monkey. The plural is then monkeys. I know English is complex but the basic patterns in beginner textbooks should be basic.

My American co-worker scribbled an S on the end of sport. When someone was talking about having "Sport(s) at school. Personally I found myself looking for a dictionary as I couldn’t remember if sport is plural or not in British English. I see the S as one of those complications as it doesn’t follow any pattern unless you teach “Maths” and “Physics” which would just further confuse things.

The Dorling-Kindersley “My First Word Board Book” (0-5 years) always makes me laugh. On the farm page: hen, chicks, pig, cow, bull, etc. and… “combine harvester” :slight_smile:

I sometimes wonder about the outdated vocabulary in modern textbooks. One word that I think does not need to be in elementary levels is “saucer”. It’s not like these kids drink coffee or tea anyway… :loco:

Maybe they don’t drink coffee and tea as we know it but they definitely drink both from a young age. Anyway saucers are used here for dumpling sauce sometimes. They’re probably more common here than knives designed for eating with.

That word “saucer” is infinitely more useful than something like “ginning”.

One of the problems I have come across is the introcuction of names in a test that the kids have never been introduced to before.

I’m talking about kids learning “His name is ____. He’s from ____”.

The books are obviously targeted at kids learning English as a foreign language and then the test has a name they’ve never seen before.

One of them being “Enrique” Where did that come from? :loco: Aside from that I think the book was pretty practical for the age and the ability.

Computer concordances like the one used by Collins Cobuild might have a list of the most common words in order. At the beginning of the Cobuild dictionary that I have you can find a list of the words in the first two or three frequency bands (but not in order).

In case you didn’t know frequencies were established by feeding something like 600,000,000 words of English from magazines, newspapers, sitcoms etc. into a computer and then letting the computer count away. I’d love to see a list that took phrases into account as well so that something like “end up” would occur on the list in the proper place according to it’s frequency relative to individual words. Anyway something like that is what is needed to sort out problems like loretta mentioned. (Neither pig nor hog was listed in either of the top two frequency bands by the way. Pig has gotta be more common though I agree.)

Of course the whole thing is complicated by the fact that the the most common words are frequently that way because they have a lot of meanings. So - just for arguement sake - lets say hog turned out to be a higher frequency word than pig because of it’s occurence in expressions like “hog wild.” That would not mean that it was neccesarily the most common way to refer to the farm animal. The list then would have to show frequencies for each meaning of each word somehow… I don’t imagine this problem has been tackled yet so in the meantime I guess all we have is our sense of the language. If you ask me this is one of the many good reasons non native speakers should refrain from writing ESL textbooks.

It only makes sense to start people off with the most common words and expressions found in the most common situations encountered by the people studying the second. This might be hard to predict but somehow I doubt that many of our students are going to be rounding up the hogs for slaughter anytime soon.

A lot of curricula(?) and even more tests are not designed with any real guiding principles. It’s a real shortcoming in the industry.

It really blows my mind.

Textbooks should be scrutinized by a large number of experts before they start getting used. Tests should be written by professionals with training in test writing. It can be on the job training, but some of the stuff I’ve seen makes me think test writers have had none at all-- they just use the same test formats they remember from school.

Texts and tests are bound to have mistakes but, there comes a point when it’s obvious the writers were incompetent.

[quote=“bob”]Computer concordances like the one used by Collins Cobuild might have a list of the most common words in order. At the beginning of the Cobuild dictionary that I have you can find a list of the words in the first two or three frequency bands (but not in order).
[/quote]

I have to have laugh at the word frequency thing. I know it is valuable and helpful, but what might be better for BEGINNERS is word frequency for beginners (this was probably alluded to earlier in the thread but probably not so defined) ah yes, there it is; Loretta: Isn’t there some standard list of names for things somewhere that language book writers have to refer to? If not, why not? It’s bad enough with differences between all the flavours of English but when people go around introducing additional complications that’s just plain silly.

I mean at a glance of the three hundred most frequently used words, God, president and government are all there, but I can’t find a single animal, colour or food. Name isn’t there and what beginners book doesn’t start with “my name is ____”? Apple doesn’t even make the top 800!!!

Of course the frequency list is more beneficial for intermediates and advanced students.

Perhaps you missed the last paragraph.

I wouldn’t teach the names of animals at all unless I was taking them to the petting zoo or something.

Or taking them to the dinner table :laughing:

Sorry if it isn’t on topic (feel free to delete), but related to the textbook contents and word frequency listings. What about the correctness. Can teaching “too” correct english ever be the case? An anecdot, an old classmate learnt German
through junior and senior high and went to Germany for the first time for a fencing competition. Living with a local family he noticed that the only person
he could communicate with was the grandmother and it was not dialect issues. It was more like: “Yes you can say that, but noone ever does…”

YingFan[/quote]

Exactly. :notworthy:

We should be teaching them the way the language is actually used in common situations.

Not only was it too complex, but it was also factually inaccurate. Chimpanzees do not have tails. By definition, “monkey with a tail” is redundant. All monkeys have tails; apes do not. Oh, and “chimp” is just a clipping of “chimpanzee” whereas the plural of “chimp” is really “chimps”.

I’d toss the book, if you can. Can’t imagine how many more mistakes there are if they missed that one.

It’s like Tarzan said to Jane “Oh no, not finch and chimps again!”

Level three reading book suddenly through in Ms Zwick.

Why Zwick? Maybe it’s a regional issue here, but I have never met anyone called Zwick. zw isn’t even an Englsih blend.

What are these people on

Come on Loretta! Everbody on my crick know that pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. Even my eight-year-olds know it because one of the stupid phonic books we were using had the word “hog”. My students are now well informed.