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CC is for Customisable Coursebooks and Creative Commons publishing
May 18th, 2010
by Valentina Dodge
Lindsay Clandfield over on Scott Thornbury’s blog in his guest post on C is for coursebook outlines what’s wrong with many coursebooks:
- They all look the same.
- They all follow the same syllabus.
- The grammar is wrong or misleading.
- Texts serve merely as a pretext to teach discrete language items.
- Texts and topics are Anglo- or Eurocentric and/or promote a western consumerist ideology.
- Texts and topics are safe, bland and vapid.
- Coursebooks are too big.
The 50+ comments that the post has attracted to date have reiterated some of the criticisms being made by many educators around the world.
1. It’s difficult even for a teacher to identify the aim of coursebook pages
2. Learning is non-linear, by nature course books are linear.
3. Language learning is a dynamic, idiosyncratic coursebook aren’t.
4. Publisher-driven projects often have the wrong focus.
5. Coursebooks are often artificial and a construct of “some other world”.
6. Cost are often prohibitive.
7. Sheer number of different coursebooks can be overwhelming.
8. Content is very often inappropriate.
9. Coursebooks can alienate learners from the process of learning English.
10. Coursebooks often teach a fossilized form of English
11. They can be overly prescriptive and descriptive (to the point of giving the learners ‘nothing’ to cling to).
12. They are predicated on a linear and incremental progression through a (fairly arbitrary) sequence of discrete grammar items.
13. Materials that have been devised for a global market cannot easily accommodate local – and personal – needs and interests.
14. The whole process is very top down.
15. Coursebooks are mostly written for teachers (for parents, and head teachers, and ministries and inspectors and exam bodies ) rather than student
16. There’s a belief that ‘progress’ can easily be measured.
17. Publishers are bound to produce what is authorised by the ministries.
18. After 20+ years of market-led material people are tired of it.
19. Don’t include enough unscripted dialogues featuring non-native speakers
20. …. and the list goes on…..
From the 50+ comments so far we can see some of the suggestions or ideas that need to be incorporated to make the ideal coursebook or course material/resources
- The internet
- More user-generated content
- Make it authentic because it is set up such that the student creates the content
- Adapt and change according to the teacher’s preference
- Make it customisable
- Allow teachers /students to add specific local content / their content
- Integrate with self-publishing elements
- Educators can work with major publishers rather than against them or outside of them
- Throw educators’ support behind innovations
- Push publishers to consider and incorporate more changes
- Teach unplugged
- Use the text book as a grounding and supplement it as is relevant to the learning styles and personalities of the learners
At present the Cambridge University Press material in the system is All Rights Reserved with the setting others may use but not change. I would simply add, real shift is happening now as educators are sharing content too. It’s great to be part of a project that promotes Creative Commons (CC) and seeing authors or course providers selecting “Others may copy and change your work.”.
This is an important move forward and I hope more authors will come on board prepared to do just that so that the 360° degree perspective can evolve further.
Material is currently being authored for the platform under the CC licence, that’s evolutionary I find!
Online language learning review
February 18th, 2008
by Cleve Miller
Here’s a nice survey post by Curt Bonk of a variety of online language learning solutions out there, with short explanations and reviews. There’s a bit of buzz right now prompted by the NY Times article that came out Sunday (reg required).
Weekly business slang post on KnowHR
January 23rd, 2008
by Cleve Miller
KnowHR is an all-around useful blog for BE professionals, and now it seems that they are doing a post on business slang every Monday.
Here’s the first one.
I actually heard someone say “incentivize” just yesterday.
Second language attitudes and income
September 12th, 2006
by Cleve
Via Seth Godin, some interesting statistics on second language attitudes in the US. Although it’s dangerous to make inferences or draw conclusions from these data, there are some interesting results.
For example, when asked to assess the importance of learning a second language for someone in business, 52% of the lowest income respondents answered “very important”, compared to 28% for the highest income respondents.
English for military purposes: useful phrases
August 11th, 2006
by Cleve
Via this month’s Harper’s magazine (print only), some examples from the online English language learning phrasebook “Military English Learning” from the website of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Daily:
The principles of war can never be changed.
A powerful navy must have smaller ships.
Special Forces can penetrate into an enemy’s rear to gather information.
This places the enemy on the horns of a dilemma.“Look, there is so much ammunition.”
“Oh, so many weapons. Great!”“These are tanks, aren’t they?”
“Yes. But this one is an armored vehicle.”Mass-destruction weapons bring more difficulties to the first aid.
Counterterrorism is a topical subject.
Every country should fight terrorists.
Do you know the most terrorist event?
It was the September 11 attack in New York.
Thousands of people died unnatural deaths.
The World Trade Center can never be mended.
Bin Laden immediately became the most famous person of the world.
Has he been dead or still alive?
No one knows, I’m afraid, except himself.
Learning local languages
July 26th, 2005
by Cleve
Via Global Voices, an interesting post from Macam-Macam. CNN reports that
Indonesia will require overseas people seeking work permits to master the local language if their jobs involve regular interaction with Indonesians, an official has said.
I had a client in Buenos Aires, an enormous US multinational, and several of the senior managers for the Argentine branch were from the States. One of these expat managers didn’t speak a word of Spanish, despite having lived in Argentina for over 10 years. He lived in a English language bubble of family, work, and mostly expat friends. I always felt bad for him and the poverty of his self-imposed internal exile.
Is language learning always social?
July 19th, 2005
by Cleve
Always-worth-reading George Siemens bucks the trend and makes the case that most learning is not social.
Now it’s pretty clear that language learning is a special subset of “learning” in general, and that the communicative essence of language learning pushes it way over towards the social end of the learning spectrum. Given.
But as language teachers we limit our effectiveness by overplaying the “social learning” card. This can happen in two ways:
1) Just because an activity is somehow “social” doesn’t mean it’s automatically good. “Let’s get our students in a chat room and they can communicate across borders!” is not necessarily going to be a productive use of our learners’ time because it’s social in nature. Activities such as this require careful preparation and set-up. Cultural factors may undermine effectiveness, as may student expectations (Paige Ware offers a fascinating diagnosis of what can go wrong, and why).
2) And if an activity is not “social”, then it’s not automatically inferior. AJ Hoge has some nice stuff on extensive reading and its value to acquisition (here’s the first one I could dig up). Self-directed solo activities can be immensely rewarding; reading, browsing the web, watching movies, listening to music…all provide rich input and are a wonderful component of any course.
This is not an argument against the social nature of language learning. The point is that we should select, design and deploy activities carefully, based on their intrinsic value, not on an easy fit into a over-generalized social learning paradigm.
Excellent post on learning from the folks at Passionate
January 27th, 2005
by Cleve
This may have been kicked around already, but if you haven’t read Most classroom learning sucks, please do. Sample quote:
The best learning occurs in a stimulating, active, challenging, interesting, engaging environment. It’s how the brain works. The best learning occurs when you move at least some part of your body. The best learning occurs when you’re actively involved in co-constructing knowledge in your own head, not passively reading or listening. (Taking notes doesn’t really count as being actively involved.)
People complain that their kids can’t pay attention in school, then their kid comes home and spends two hours studying the elaborate world of Halo 2. Reading, absorbing, problem solving, using sophisticated mental maps, and on it goes.
When learning is “presented” in a push model, your brain says, “This is SO not important.” You’re in for the battle of your life when you try to compete against the brain’s natural instinct to scan for unusual, novel, possibly life-threatening or life-enhancing things.