It’s BYOB time again: Blame Your Old Book! Time for teachers to lay the burden of a year’s worth of pedagogical and academic failure on the textbooks they used, and to start looking for new books they can scapegoat next year.
Fear not. Every year in the language education field there are hundreds of new titles to choose from. Some of them are so good that to fail with them you’d almost literally have to use them as a pillow and take a nap at the lectern every week. However, there are always a few duds that make their way into print as well. Here are some sketchy ones I was thumbing through recently with examples of activities I took issue with.
An ESP (English for Specific Purposes) textbook for nursing students called You’ve Got It Bad:
A chutes-and-ladders type game called Disease Transmission, with in-square directives like these:
- “Your host doesn’t get enough sleep at night. Move ahead 3 spaces.”
- “Vaccination! Lose 5 turns!”
- “The dog sleeps on the dinner table, but no one notices. Spin again.”
- “Diagnosis: incurable. Collect 20 glycoproteins and advance to terminal stage!”
A dialogue between a patient and a hospital worker that tries to be conveniently vague but is so ambiguous that it’s unclear whether the interlocutors are talking about taking medicine or making a credit card payment:
- A: Uh oh.
- B: What’s the matter?
- A: I might have given you the wrong one.
- B: The wrong one?
- A: Take this one instead.
- B: It’s too late!
- A: Can’t you just start over?
- B: It’s already processing!
- A: Oh my god!
A heavily prescriptive textbook called English Ultimatum in which the authors try to create a “new standard” of English that they say is more logical and easier to use:
- A dialogue that promotes loading up on present progressives to aid in understanding:
- A: Are you liking any sports?
- B: Yes, I am currently liking golfing and tennising.
- A: That’s neat.
- B: How about you? What sports are you liking?
- A: Me? Well, I’m not liking sports much these days. I was liking soccering for a while until I blew out my knee.
- B: You what?
- A: Uh, my medial leg joint is languishing in a state of injury.
- B: Oh, I see.
- A: See what?
- B: I am seeing...I am understanding.
- A: Under what?
- B: Oh, never mind!
A pragmatics-obsessed textbook, called It’s Your Attitude, that promises to give the learner exposure to all varieties of politeness, or lack thereof:
A dialogue between two customers in a liquor store:
- A: This is the express lane, isn’t it?
- B: See that sign there above you? It says, “express lane.”
- A: I see. It just looks like you have more than 10 items in your cart.
- B: Wow, you can’t read or count. How do you make it through the day?
- A: ________________________
Activity 1: Choose a suitable response for A:
- I’m terribly sorry for bothering you.
- You don’t have to be so rude.
- I don’t know, but I’m guessing you need that whole cartload of vodka coolers to get through your day.