The Language Teacher

Textbooks are indispensable tools, but how many times have you started out with a textbook only to find the exercises turning to thin gruel, forcing you to scramble to fill in the gaps? This article provides an evaluation system and score sheet to help university conversation teachers anticipate and forestall these and other problems in textbook selection. By first systematically recording their overall evaluation of the textbook and peripherals, followed by carefully inspecting key components, teachers can best choose the textbooks appropriate for each class.

PART I. Start with the textbook's "system" and avoid inspection errors

When you choose a textbook, you are not only selecting what the students will see but also an array of peripherals, the textbook's "system," which may include the teachers manual, tests, and audio tapes. All of these have considerable bearing on the overall ease of use and quality of the textbook.

The better textbooks have teacher's manuals. Producing a good manual can require a lot of deliberation and may affect the development of the textbook itself. Even if the teacher's manual is not sensational, the authors will have had to look through each and every exercise to be able to present them in the manual. Generally, the longer the manual, the more "goodies"--such as teaching ideas and supplemental activities--it has and the more useful it will be. Features to look for in a teacher's manual include: interleaving--putting the manual and the student's book together; comprehensive vocabulary lists; additional activities--perhaps photo-reproducible, and clear presentation not only of the lessons but also the strategy behind the textbook. Unfortunately, publishers rarely give away sample copies of the teacher's manual, so teachers may need to rely on the limited information available in the catalog to assess them.

A very few textbooks come with tests. Whether you use the tests or not, the development of tests is a "good sign," which often indicates more careful preparation of the textbook. Moreover, the test materials can often be used as supplementary activities.

Tapes also can be a productive supplement to a textbook if they contain genuine listening tasks. The common pattern is for publishers to send out a promotional tape with sample lessons rather than a complete tape, but even these allow a useful assessment of the tape. Do the tapes merely provide recordings of the conversations that appear in the text, or do they introduce expanded listening opportunities?

The typical university conversation class has around 35 students of mixed levels, meeting once a week for ninety minutes for a total class time of about 45 hours per year. Most teachers probably wouldn't use a single textbook as their only classroom resource, but at the same time, many feel reluctant to make students purchase two textbooks, especially since popular texts can run close to \2000 per copy. If the textbook has too few or skimpy lessons, you will be struggling to produce "supplemental" materials or running the copy machine overtime.

When you first examine the textbook, ignore the cover copy. The blurb on the cover will usually emphasize how easy the textbook is to use, how useful and fun it is for the students, and how it will address the needs and level of your class, sometimes by using a less-than-informative level-definition such as "false beginner." One textbook describes false beginners as "students who have studied English previously but who have not had much chance to actively use what they have learned" (Graves & Rein, 1988, p. viii), a definition that probably includes 95 percent of the EFL student population in Japan. Talk about marketing strategy! The publisher's claims that the text addresses a certain level are also largely unhelpful since there is little or no consensus among textbook writers about what grammar points, what functions, or how much practice of each fit which level (Brown, 1994). You are better off looking at the actual material itself and making your own judgment.

Always begin by looking at the textbook from back to front. Beyond greetings and self-introductions, which usually come up in the first few lessons, there is little agreement about what is important to teach or when to teach it (Brown, 1994), so starting your inspection at the back may help you to see how the textbook is unique. Moreover, some textbooks do not maintain a consistent focus from beginning to end. The authors may have run out of ideas at lesson 10 but have been asked by their publisher to create 15 lessons. If you can only use two-thirds of a textbook, it will affect how much time you plan to spend on the lessons and on creating materials to compensate for their inadequacies.

In addition, looking from the back prevents the "to the teacher" or "for the student" messages from prejudicing your own assessment. It also assures that you will assess each lesson critically, without having seen an introductory table, for instance, purporting to tell you which grammar points and functions are taught in each lesson.

PART II. Looking at the lessons in the textbook

Now that you've ignored the covers and opened the book "Japanese-style," here are some suggestions for looking at the lessons for maximum benefit. This overview of the process will help you prepare to fill in the evaluation form.

a) Weigh what skills the lessons focus on. Some textbooks offer lots of reading practice, while others stress one of the other skill areas. Few teachers spend all of the class time in conversation activities. Reading, writing, and listening exercises can also contribute to a well-balanced lesson. How much attention each textbook focuses on the respective skills varies from book to book, so it is up to the teacher to decide what arrangement will best serve the interests of the students.

b) Glance over the last three lessons. How many of the exercises would you want to replicate if you were writing your own textbook? If they don't capture your attention, your students will probably find them uninteresting as well.

c) Act out a couple of activities in your head. Are they useful? Do your students really need to know how to gossip by saying, "Did you hear that Ron had cholera?" (Richards & Bycina, 1985, p. 84)? Are the pair-work activities really pair-work, or do they have the students doing things like "pricing items" (Richards with Hull & Proctor, 1990, p. 78)?

Many exercises donﾕt seem to achieve much. Richards, with Hull and Proctor (1991) ask students to put such places as an American Express office, city hall, a concert hall, the IBM building, the Immigration office, etc. under the headings "commercial buildings," "gov't office buildings," and "arts and entertainment centers" (p. 78). While individual weaknesses such as these may not detract too heavily from well-designed textbooks, teachers need to assess how many of them there are how much teacher-time might be necessary to compensate for them.

Other functions taught may be inappropriate for the proficiency-level of your students, such as "complaining" in a textbook which describes itself as low-intermediate (Richards, with Hull & Proctor, 1991), for example. How much complaining is even an advanced EFL student likely to do? A single textbook can have exercises which are relatively easy for your students while presenting others which are extremely challenging. You, the teacher, are best situated to decide about the suitability of the materials for your students.

d) If you were studying a foreign language--say, Japanese--would you want or need to practice the points in the lessons?

e) Can your students really learn to use the points in the lesson? This is a difficult question, but I think most teachers will have some sense of how much practice their students need to learn a point. Low-level students asked to practice apologies and give excuses, for instance, are simply not likely to be able to use them effectively. Textbook-level opportunities to apologize are far too infrequent for students to make use of them outside the classroom. Moreover, the cultural "fine points" of making excuses are often difficult even for native speakers to handle. For most students, the fall-back "I'm sorry" is enough.

f) Consider the number of points being covered by each lesson. Are the students required to practice a large variety of grammar items and functions in each unit? There is wide discrepancy among textbooks claiming to address similar levels. One may provide several exercises for each grammar point (Graves and Rein, 1988), while another mixes grammar points with fewer exercises (Harmer, J. and Sunguine, H., 1990, p. 4). Think about your own study of language. Did you learn a language by doing exercises like the ones in the textbook you are considering? Could you?

g) Is it immediately apparent what grammar items are being practiced? Look closely at any boxes, often highlighted in a different color, listing grammar points taught. Do the points in the box stick to a single element or do they include a variety of features? One textbook may introduce only one grammar point in a lesson with a variety of practices (Viney, P., Viney, K. & Rein, 1993, pp. 44-46). Another introduces at least four grammar points in one highlighted box (Helgesen, Brown, & Mandeville, 1988, p. 39), while a third hardly mentions grammar structures as such at all, requiring that students practice conversations (Richards, Bycina, & Aldcorn, 1995)--a kind of "phrase book" approach. These dramatic differences in presentation mean that you must judge which format is most appropriate for your students and your style of teaching.

h) How about the functions? Do you use them yourself frequently? If not, why are EFL students learning them? Some textbooks ask the students to practice things that even native speakers might use infrequently: returning purchased items, for example (Richards, Bycina and Aldcorn, 1995, p. 54). Similarly, practicing "Could I borrow your cat?" (Helgesen, Brown and Mandeville, 1988, p. 49) may provide useful practice of the "could I borrow..." form, but you, the teacher, must decide how often your students will need to borrow things.

i) Look at the amount of art work in each lesson. While colorful pages make for a lively presentation, occasionally the art work seems to conceal the fact that there are really very few exercises on each page. There is no problem with this in principle, but it may have a direct bearing on whether there will be enough of the "right stuff" to keep your class going for the full year.

PART III. The textbook's extras

Next, turn to the front of the book. At the beginning of what I consider the better books, there is a table showing the grammar focus and functions of each lesson. This simple guide is often missing from textbooks, making the teacher flip through the pages to grasp the contents of each lesson. As with the teacher's manual, the preparation of this kind of list can have a positive effect on the textbook writing process. As the list is made, adjustments such as changes in the order of presentation, for instance, may be made to good effect. A simple table of contents with the lesson titles is rarely adequate to make a preliminary judgment about what will be presented in each unit. One textbook offers this information for Lesson 34: "Macumba!" (White & Williams, 1990, p. 3), while another provides the following for Lesson 13: "I won't be home for lunch today" (Buckingham & Whitney, 1995, p. 3). Neither would be transparent enough to aid a teacher in deciding whether to use that textbook or not. In contrast, other texts provide dense outlines in print so small that one finds oneself paging through the lessons to get some idea of what the text is all about. One textbook offers clear information in a chart form, presenting topics, functions, grammar/pronunciation, listening, writing/reading, and a class activity in a two-page spread (Richards, J.C. with Hull, J. and Proctor, S., 1991, pp. iv-v). Again, since publishers rarely send desk copies of the teacher's manual, we usually have to evaluate how the textbook will work in our classes based only on the student's book.

Either by examining the introductory table of information or by paging through the textbook in front-to-back order, look to see if points made in earlier lessons are "recycled" in later lessons. Recycling will have an effect on how you use the textbook, since not doing lessons in sequence could be less effective.

Some textbooks have a continuing story which often appears either as a reading or as the introductory conversation of each lesson (Graves & Rein, 1988; White & Williams, 1990). These continuing stories may work for the student who never misses a class or the teacher who starts with lesson one, continues straight through the textbook, and finishes it without skipping anything. For university classes where attendance can be spotty, however, the continuing story may end up being dropped. This means less useful material overall.

Finally, the age of the textbook can be an important factor. Exercises that ask young students to talk about famous people they may never have heard of, such as Bishop Desmond Tutu or Dolly Parton, for example (Richards, J.C. with Hull, J. and Proctor, S., 1990, p. 4), or mention events that are "ancient history," often force the teacher to scramble to substitute other information.

I have worked up this process into an evaluation form which you can use as you evaluate textbooks. While not covering all the points that we may look at in choosing a textbook, this evaluation process should provide a good jumping off place for assessing the books for your classes. The evaluation form itself follows the instructions below.

As an example, let's review a textbook for a listening and speaking class. The textbook we will review is Interactions 2, a listening/speaking skills book.

Textbook Evaluation Form Instructions

1. Is there a teacher's manual? Yes = 5 points. Add one point for each ten pages it is longer than the textbook up to 5 more points, or subtract one point for each ten pages it is shorter than the textbook down to no less than 2 points.

In our review textbook there is a manual but it is only 22 pages long while the text is 182 pages long. It gets 2 points

2. Does the textbook come with its own tests or testing suggestions? Yes = 10 points

The textbook we are reviewing provides tests, so it gets 10 points in this category.

3. Flip quickly through the last three lessons, and using the lines on the form, mark the number of times each skill is addressed. If there are four reading exercises, eleven speaking exercises, and three listening exercises per unit, you will have those numbers in the boxes on the evaluation form. "Listening" does not include mere tape recordings of the grammar or function points unless a genuine listening task could be created from them. The numbers on the lines provide an outline of the textbook's focus. Does the resulting outline fit what you want for your class? Rate 1 to 5; top score 5 points. Multiply the score by 2.

In the text we are reviewing, a lesson has: 1 reading, 3 writing, 8 listening and 6 speaking exercises. Since ours is a listening/speaking class, this looks pretty good. Let's give it a 5; times two equals 10 points.

4. Allowing for skipping some exercises and supplementing with teacher-created materials, is there enough stuff? A typical college conversation class could run through two or more pages per hour in some textbooks; more if you skip some of the exercises. Choose a lesson at random and decide how much time you will need to cover it in your class. This should be easier than it seems, since you will have already looked at the exercises carefully in Part II of the evaluation process. Multiply this amount of time by the number of the lessons. Conduct this test after you have eliminated the points that you think will be hard or impossible to teach. In other words, if you eliminate 20% of each lesson because it is not what you want to teach or because it is plain stupid, this will reduce the volume of the text by 20%. Will there still be enough goodies to last the whole year, or will you be hogging the copy machine during the last couple of weeks?

1 = probably not enough

2 = probably enough

Multiply the score by 5.

In our review text, we could expect to spend about three to four hours per lesson: at least two on the major listening features and perhaps a little more than one on the speaking portions. Let's split the difference and call it 3 and a half hours. Since there are 12 lessons, this gives us about 42 hours of class time-- not quite enough. If we allow for testing and other activities, it might be enough, so let's give the text the benefit of the doubt and 10 points in this category.

5. Look at the last three lessons. Are there exercises you would want to replicate in the textbook you would like to write?

1 = nothing really gripping

2 = maybe one exercise

3 = a couple of exercises look pretty good

4 = only a couple of exercises look weak

5 = I would use entire lessons "as is"

Multiply the score by 2.

Looking at the last three lessons in our textbook, I find that the mini-lecture with the note taking outline already provided looks like something Iﾕd want in a textbook I would write. Let's say that is "a couple of exercises" since the lecture is one and the note-taking outline is another. I'll give it a score of 3; times two equals 6 points in this category.

6. Choose two more lessons at random to look at the content of the exercises they present.

(a) Is the level of all the practice exercises suitable for your students, or are some much more difficult than others. Consistent level = up to 2 points

All of the exercises seem to be of consistent level in our review textbook, so it gets 2 points here.

(b) Do the activities in the lessons ask that the students practice something that they are likely to use? Yes = up to 2 points

All of the exercises focusing on listening are useful, but the speaking exercises may obligate the students to carry on rather "artificial" conversations. This will require creativity on the part of the teacher, me. Let's give it 1 point here.

(c) Do the activities that ask students to work together give them a "real" task? Yes = up to 2 points

All of the group activities and discussions are "real" in that they tie directly to the listening materials, but that may not have any bearing on the real world out there. Some of the role play activities stretch my sense of what students might "really" do, so let's rate this category a O.

(d) Are grammar items presented and explained clearly? Yes = up to 2 points

There are no grammar items presented or explained in this book. 0 points.

(e) Look at the art work and pictures. Do they cover for skimpy lessons? No = up to 2 points

(A word-count of a page of exercises can be informative here. Fewer than 200 words, including instructions, is often a sign that you might be able to whiz through the lessons faster than you want to.)

The art work is actually quite skimpy in our textbook, and in no way acts as a cover for a lack of material. Letﾕs give the text a 2 on this one.

Total for (a) through (e) is 5 points.

7. Look at the last three lessons again. If the textbook were a text for a foreign language you were studying, would it be useful for you? Assign a score.

1 = not really necessary

2 = probably not necessary

3 = maybe I could use it

4 = probably necessary

5 = it would be essential

Multiply the score by 2.

I think I could improve listening using much of what this textbook has to offer, but some of the speaking exercises would leave me cold. Let's be middling here and call it a 3. That gives us 6 points for this category.

8. Is there an overview of the textbook at the beginning that lists the functions and structures that will be taught in each lesson? Yes = 5 points.

Does it provide immediately clear information about what the contents of the lessons are? Rate it 1 to 5 for this and add the score to the 5 points above. If it is opaque to you and you find yourself looking at the lessons to find out what actually is covered, subtract 2 points.

In the review text, there is a comprehensive chart showing the listening skills, the conversation features/functions, the note-taking skills, the listening tasks, and the speaking activities at the front of the book. The text gets 5 points for having the information and another 5 for presenting it clearly. Thatﾕs 10 points in this category.

9. Choose another lesson at random. Are your students likely to learn the points presented? Does the lesson provide lots of exercises for one grammar point or several grammar points with only one exercise each. Does the lesson try to teach more than one function? Are there enough exercises that some of it would stick to most of the members of your class?

1 = doesn't look too acquirable

2 = some of the points could be acquired

3 = about half of it could be acquired

4 = most of it could be acquired

5 = almost all of it could be acquired

Multiply the score by 2.

Since listening is one of the major features of the text, I'd have to say that it provides enough practice to be useful. The speaking activities, while reinforcing the listening portion, don't look like they would "stick" as such. Let's rate this a 3; times two equals 6 points in this category.

10. Is the book a recent publication/edition?

1 = more than 5 years old

2 = 4 years old

3 = 3 years old

4 = 2 years old

5 = one year old

Multiply the score by 2.

Materials can get out of date very quickly. The 1970's may seem like only yesterday to you, but most college students were not born until the mid-seventies. This means that lessons which need popular information from as late as 1985 will be challenging for many of them.

Our review book is very recent, having been published in 1996. It gets the full 10 points here.

Our total score for the textbook is 75 points.

Textbook Evaluation Form

Textbook Name ____________________________ Author _____________________

Publisher __________________________ ISBN number ______________________

Agent's name _____________________ Phone ____________ Fax ______________

_____ 1.	Is there a teacher's manual? Yes = 5 points: + 1 for each ten pages more than students book; -1 for each ten pages less.
_____ 2.	Are there tests? Yes = 10 points
_____ 3.	Is the skills orientation suitable? 1 = poor; 5 = excellent (x 2) Reading Writing Listening Speaking _____ _____ _____ _____
_____ 4.	Is there enough material? 1 = probably not; 2 = probably (x 5)
_____ 5.	Are there any exercises you would replicate for your textbook? 1 = none; 5 = all of them (x 2)
_____ 6.	_____ a. Are the practice exercises all at a consistent level? Yes = up to 2 _____ b. Are your Ss likely to use what they get from the text? Yes = up to 2 _____ c. Do the pair work activities give Ss a "real" task? Yes = up to 2 _____ d. Clear grammar point presentation and explanation? Yes = up to 2 _____ e. Too much art work? No = up to 2
_____ 7.	Would the exercises be useful for you in your FL study? 1 = not really; 5 = essential (x 2)
_____ 8.	Is there an overview of the textbook at the beginning or only a table of contents? Yes = 5 Does it provide clear and helpful information? + 1 = a little; + 5 = a lot; No = -2
_____ 9.	Can your students acquire the material using the presentation? 1 = doubtful; 5 = definitely (x 2)
_____ 10.	Is it a recent publication/edition? 1 = >5 yrs. old; 5 = 1 yr. old (x 2)
_____	Total (out of 100 points)

References

Brown, James B. (1994). Conversation Instruction: Do we know what we're doing? Keiwa Bulletin, Vol. 3.

Buckingham, A., & Whitney, N. (1995). Passport . New York: Oxford University Press.

Graves, K., & Rein, D.P. (1988) East West 1 . New York: Oxford University Press

Harmer, J., & Sunguine, H. (1990).Coast to Coast 2. New York: Longman.

Helgesen, M., Brown, S., & Mandeville, T. (1988) English Firsthand Plus. Japan: Lingual House.

Richards, J.C., & Bycina, D. (1985). Person to Person 2 . New York: Oxford University Press.

Richards, J.C., with Hull, J. & Proctor, S. (1990)Interchange 1 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Richards, J.C., with Hull, J. & Proctor, S. (1991).Interchange 2 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Richards, J.C., Bycina D., & Aldcorn S.B.(1995). New Person to Person 1. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tanka, J., & Baker, L.R. (1996) Interactions 2 A Listening/Speaking Skills Book. New York: McGraw-Hill Company, Inc.

Viney, P., Viney, K., & Rein, D.P. (1993). Main Street 1. New York: Oxford University Press.

White, R., & Williams, E. (1990). Take One. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd.