HOW CAN YOU USE A TEXTBOOK AS A COURSE TOOL?

HOW CAN YOU USE A TEXTBOOK AS A COURSE TOOL?

To understand how a textbook is an instrument or a tool, we can compare it to a musical instrument, a piano, for example. The piano provides you with the means for producing music, but it cannot produce music on its own. The music is produced only when you play it. Playing well requires practice and familiarity with the piece. The more skilled you are, the more beautiful the music. Just as a piano does not play music, a textbook does not teach language. The textbook is a stimulus or instrument for teaching and learning. Clearly, the quality of the instrument also affects the quality of the music. However, if it is in tune, even the most humble piano can produce beautiful music in the hands of a skilled musician. The musical instrument analogy falls short because it involves only one performer, while success in teaching with a textbook depends also on the students who use it. Perhaps as teachers, we are called on to be not only musicians, but also piano tuners, composers, and conductors. 

In working with teachers, I frequently come across the attitude that a textbook is sacred and not to be tampered with. In a previous chapter I said that we often give too much power to written documents such as our syllabuses or lesson plans, which in turn may prevent us from paying attention to how the students are using them. This is multiplied 3 hundred fold when it comes to a text- book. Such an attitude is detrimental both to the students and to the teacher because it assumes that the way teachers teach is uniform, and the way learners learn is predictable; that there is a certain way to teach a textbook, and that the results will be the same each rime. Teachers' experiences disprove such assumptions repeatedly. The mental landscape of teaching is dotted with cries of “But it worked so well the last time I taught it.”

A more disturbing aspect of such assumptions is the underlying notion that teaching doesn't involve decision making or skill based on our understandings, beliefs, and experience, which Michael Apple (1986) has called the "deskilling" of teachers. This deskilling is evident in the attitude that it is the textbook that teaches the students, rather than the teacher or the students themselves. One study of commercially prepared reading materials for elementary school students found that reading instruction was understood as students absorbing what was in the book rather than as collaboration among author, teacher, and student. (Shannon 1987, p. 314). To reiterate the analogy with the musical instrument, just as the piano doesn't play the music, the textbook doesn't teach the language, A good textbook-one that meets students' needs, is at the right level, has interesting material, and so on can be a boon to a teacher because it can free him or her to focus on what the students do with it. However, no textbook was written for your actual group of students, and so it will need to be adapted in someway.

There are two facets to understanding how to use a textbook. The first is the textbook itself: "getting inside it" so you can understand how it is constructed and why. The second is everything other than the textbook: the context, the students, and you, the teacher. The second facet is important, because when you evaluate a textbook, you generally use the lenses of your experience and context to evaluate it, and I think it is important to be aware of those lenses. The first facer, getting inside the textbook, is important so that you know what you are adapting supplementing. The second facet helps you to be clear about what you are adapting it to.

The first step in using a textbook as a tool—getting inside it and understanding how it is put together and why—is actually a series of steps that includes three of the elements of designing a course: conceptualizing content, formulating goals and objectives, and organizing the course. In a sense, you retrace with the authors how they conceptualized content, what the organizing principle(s) is, how the text content is sequenced what the objectives of each unit are, and how the units are organized. A good place to start is with the table of contents, since it lays out both what is in the book, how the units are sequenced, and, depending on the text, the content and organization of individual units.

In the following investigations, you will examine the cables of contents of three textbooks. The investigations will use the following framework as the basis for analysis.

Figure 9.1: A Framework for Investigating How a Textbook is Put Together

• How have the authors conceptualized content, i.e. what aspects of language, learning, and social context are being addressed?
• How is the material organized, i.e., what is the organizing principle(s)?
• On what basis are the units sequenced? What is the content of a unit?
• What are the objectives of the unit? In other words what should the students know or be able to do by the end of the unit?
• How does the unit content help to achieve the objectives?

One you have “gotten inside” of the textbook and understand how its content is organized, you can consider how you want to adapt it. You have a range of choices about how much to adapt a textbook. You may stick to the syllabus and make adoptions at the activity level. You may stick to the syllabus and adapt at the unit level by doing the activities in a different order than in the book, chancing, eliminating, or adding activities. You may adapt it at the syllabus and adapt at the unit level by adding new areas to the syllabus or eliminating parts of it. The adaptions are cumulative: adapting at the unit level involves adaption at the activity level; adapting at the syllabus level involves adaption at the unit level. Such choices depend on your experience with the textbook: it is easier to adapt a textbook once you have taught it. Those choices also depend on your context and your students’ needs.

Figure 9.4: A Range o Choices with Respect to Adapting a Textbook

• The activity level: change, supplement, eliminate activities.
• The unit level: change the order of activities and adapt existing activities.
• The book/syllabus level: change, add to or eliminate parts the syllabus