I teach adults for a living, and I’ve been doing it (interspersed with periods of product R&D work in IT) for longer than I care to remember. I conduct business skills workshops these days, as well, but my bread and butter is language teaching.
A bane of the ESL teacher’s existence is the undeniable fact that there are, to put it bluntly, a lot of textbooks for adult learners that are, to varying degrees, crap. The reasons for this state of affairs are many and varied, of course. Many of them are weighed down under more than one layer of the old language guano. You’re waist-deep before you even get started, digging through the stink to find something useful. But I’m here to help.
A few of the most common problems:
- You Vill Follow Zee Instructions: scrupulous adherence to outmoded ‘methods’
- The Horrors of Clipart: design that is user-unfriendly, or just plain ugly. (Much could be learned from good web site design, here)
- Siloed Syllabi: chunks of grammar (or language functions) are attacked (I choose that word with care), worried at like a terrier with a rat, then forgotten in the next section
- The Random Walk Theory of Textbook Structure: throw slips of paper labelled with verb tenses and grammar patterns into hat, shake it and turn it out on your desk. Voila! There is your outline for your textbook. (Korean-language textbooks for English speakers are the purest example of this kind of thing, for the most part)
- Formulaic Fundamentalism: Begin with stilted dialogue, then vocabulary list, follow up with humiliatingly banal ‘activity’, ancient, inauthentic reading and comprehension questions: lather, rinse, repeat.
- More Words, More Better: Business English is all about reading interminable articles, parsing spreadsheets and boring the tits off anybody in the blast radius.
- Be Free, Little Butterflies: Speaking skill is what the students want, amirite? Structural knowledge is soooo 10 minutes ago, dude. They can’t form the present tense yet? No worries — toss ‘em into the pool, get ‘em babbling away with this randomly constructed list of fascinating questions about eating noodles! Right.
These are, of course, just a sampling of the sins against the teacher and insults to the student committed by textbook publishers, of course.
The three biggest producers of lines of ESL textbooks for adults are Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, and Pearson/Longman (Oxford and Cambridge Presses both have poorly organized, confusing, slow websites. Prepare to be frustrated if you visit them). There are others, of course, but most of the series I’ve encountered in decades of teaching have been from these publishers, for better (sometimes) or worse (often).
Variation in quality between different titles, even within a single publisher’s catalogue, is a bit shocking, even to an unshockable old duffer like me. They range from superb (American Headway) to merely adequate (like New Person to Person, by Jack Richards, whose essay ‘30 Years of TEFL/TESL: A Personal Reflection‘ is a must-read if you’re in the field) to slightly embarrassing (New Interchange sucks in more ways than I care to think about).
The same problems and the same wild variation in quality exists in the Business English space as well. Cambridge’s New International Business English is one of the worst books I’ve ever seen along several of the axes of awful I mentioned above. A real stinker. Global Links from Longman is slightly better (while making the idiotic and all-too-common (and bewilderingly stupid) mistake of using readings that start with things like ‘Carly Fiorina is CEO of HP…’), and Communicating In Business, also from Cambridge, is actually pretty damn good, if demandingly difficult.
If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably looking for a recommendation or two.
These are mine: if you’re teaching English to adults (and you can group them more or less into levels from False Beginner to Advanced), you can’t do better (as of this year) than the American Headway series. They are well-designed and engaging, and structured in such a way that it is clear that they were written from a deep understanding of the way people approach and learn language. They have great depth for the dedicated teacher, and plenty of material that will make the novice look good, merely by following along. They eschew most of the cliche content that makes so many ESL textbooks tedious exercises in repetition. They have excellent companion teachers’ guides. I can find very little to complain about (other than Oxford’s tendency to use the same small stable of voice actors for all the recordings in a book, and even across different books) — I’ve used them for a few years now, and am happy to revisit them with each new class. Each time through, I find new ways in which links between concepts and structures have been embedded in the books’ structures, and ways to extend and enrich the material.
If you’re teaching Business English, I recommend Cambridge’s Communicating in Business. It’s intended for Intermediate to Advanced students, and demands business knowledge on the part of the teacher, but it rewards effort, and is directly applicable to the requirements of students wanting to increase their skills in and understanding of the language of international business.
Got some recommendations of your own? Post them in the comments, below, with my thanks. There are a lot of books I haven’t seen (for which, if experience is any guide, I can count my blessings).
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