What should a good textbook look like and include?

Work Teaching English in Taiwan
1

I know this buxiban owner who has decided to publish his own textbooks.

Yes, we know that there is no shortage of textbooks already. But he’s decided to go ahead anyway and has asked me for some input. So I’ll ask for yours…

The books are for Taiwanese ADULTS. He wants to do a complete series at four or more levels, twelve units per level. Each unit should form the basis of a 90 minute lesson, focused on speaking. (Don’t say it, please!)

My feeling is that he first needs to list the learning objectives of each lesson. What exactly is it he wants to teach people who have studied this stuff for years but still not got the hang of?

Having got his list of what to teach, am I right in thinking that he should start with teaching plans for each lesson and develop the content around that? It seems to make more sense to me to do it that way rather than write the text books first and then figure out how to teach from them.

He also wants to do a workbook, but my experience has been that adults don’t usually do homework.

Another issue is that he sells ‘all you can eat’ packages which allow students to attend as many lessons as they wish, with the result that they chop and change between courses and teachers all the time. Actually following a syllabus, or even expecting all the students in the room at one time to be at the same level, is rather unrealistic. Each unit will probably have to stand alone to a certain degree.

Any suggestions about what to teach, what not to teach, how to present stuff, activities, features to include, etc. are welcome.

He hasn’t even decided on the visuals yet. Photos, sketches, comics, or what?

I suppose in a way this opens up all sorts of opportunities to do something a bit off-the-wall. He’s collected tons of what he calls ‘raw content’ - sample dialogues and articles, etc. - but it needs to be collated and expanded upon. And if he wants to stand out in the crowd it’s not going to be enough.

So here you go: We’ve all bitched about the books we have to use. Now is your opportunity to say how it should be done. There are, incidentally, a couple of full-time jobs to be had doing this, and I’ll also suggest that he has an open meeting for interested parties to come around and share their thoughts over some food and drink.

Thanks in advance.

2

No need to reinvent the wheel. The person behind this project just needs to get a bunch of books that he/she has used in the classroom and take the best elements from them. The feedback from teachers would probably be most valuable when testing the materials rather than at the more abstract planning stage.

3

I don’t know what a “good” textbook for adults would be but for me, as a student of Chinese, I found that my elementary school books, the school I work at, are the best. They are short, concise and focused. Not only that, they have vocab that I have found that I could immediately use when I finished the lesson. In other words, it was engaging and made me feel like I learned something.

Adults who are learning or practicing their English need to leave each class feeling that what they learned can be applied immediately.

4

[quote]What exactly is it he wants to teach people who have studied this stuff for years but still not got the hang of?
[/quote]
He needs to be getting that info from his students.
Assuming he has been teaching adults for several years already:

  1. Start with the achilles heel of the English language.
  2. Compare/ contrast the grammar differences E vs C. iron that out. [ good luck, as many are fossilized errors :s ]
  3. Interests of students. Biz English. Tourism/ Computer lingo etc,…what have you…<— Can break that down into a quite a few “specialty” classes. Level / proficiency dependent would be the best case scenario.

Re: Bells and whistles: Graphics etc.
Not much in the way of substitute for a good teacher or a motivated student.

A good teacher can teach with a can of Coca cola and a white board for 90 mins if s/he had to. The students could come away with a decent lesson in colors, prepostions, tenses etc…

Reinventing the wheel…probabley better off developing a training system for his teachers based on the materials available. The best text book is wasted on a teacher that can’t teach. A good teacher can teach with a plastic bag.