Humanising an EAP Textbook
Brian Tomlinson, UK
Brian Tomlinson is a Visiting Professor at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, and a freelance consultant living in Langkawi, Malaysia. He is also Founder and President of MATSDA (the Materials Development Association). Brian has worked in Indonesia, Japan, Nigeria, Oman, Singapore, Vanuatu and Zambia and has given conference presentations in over sixty countries. His numerous publications include Discover English, Openings, Materials Development in Language Teaching, Developing Materials for Language Teaching and English Language Teaching Materials. E-mail: brianjohntomlinson@googlemail.com
Menu
Introduction
The Situation at Sultan Qaboos University
The Problems with the Textbooks
My Attempts to Humanise the Coursebooks
Subversion
Adding a Challenge
Personalisation
Localisation
Supplementation
Conclusions
References
In Tomlinson (2003a) I focused on ways of humanising the coursebook and gave many examples of procedures that I've used in the last forty three years to achieve this. At many conferences since teachers have told me how much they appreciated these examples but have often also told me that there was no way they could humanise their particular coursebook for their particular class. I've given these teachers encouragement and suggestions but I've wondered how I'd feel if I was in their apparently hopeless situation. Now I know. For the last four months I've been teaching low level EAP classes at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman and it's been a real challenge to humanise the textbooks.
I've always had problems in persuading EAP textbook writers and teachers of the value of humanistic approaches to language learning. I make the point that a humanistic approach isn't an indulgence but a necessity, if durable acquisition and development is to take place. But many of them reply that they have so little time available in order to give students the English they need in order to study their subjects in English that they can't waste time with humanistic activities. They say they must focus on teaching the structures, vocabulary and skills their students will very shortly need. They are hoping the impossible will happen with their students and that for the first time in the history of language learning intake will equal input and their students will actually learn what they are taught. I've been told that my humanistic approach of engaging the students affectively and cognitively and helping them to become responsible for their own learning is too 'soft' for EAP and that their students need a much 'harder' teaching-centred approach. I was told this by many members of the audience at a plenary I did at a BALEAP Conference in Edinburgh. They said that the activities I'd demonstrated were very creative and enjoyable but they were suitable for General English students rather than for students of EAP. I was told exactly the same when I wrote a materials development module for an MA in EAP at a British university and when I advocated using literature with EAP students in articles and at conferences. I can understand the EAP teacher's position. They are often given impossible tasks by their institutions. They are asked in an unrealistically short time to take their students from a low level of proficiency to a level equivalent to that of a native speaker studying academic subjects in their L1. No wonder that EAP textbooks typically focus on teaching as much as possible. At least the teacher can claim that they have covered what the students need, even if the students haven't actually learned how to use it.
In September 2007 Hitomi Masuhara and I arrived at the Language Center in Sultan Qaboos University (SQU), Muscat as Curriculum Specialists. Our main role was to continue the work we had started as consultants in January 2007 in guiding teachers to develop institution specific materials to replace the commercial textbooks currently in use. We've helped three teachers to complete a new Level 2 Writing Course and we're working with six teachers now on a Level 3 Reading and Writing Course. The materials in these new courses follow a text-driven approach (Tomlinson 2003b) and they are informed by such humanistic principles as localisation (Tomlinson 2006), personalisation, flexibility, multi-dimensional representation, cognitive stimulus and affective engagement. Already they are having a positive impact on student motivation and achievement.
At the same time as working as Curriculum Specialists we've been giving workshops on such topics as text-driven materials development, testing and language awareness, and we've been teaching 'low level' classes ourselves. It is on my experience of using a prescribed textbook to teach Level 2 students that I want to focus this article.
Level 2 is the lowest of five levels in the Language Centre and consists of students who have studied English for six years at secondary school but who have scored very low grades on the reading, listening and writing tests students are given on entry to the university. These students have a problem because they must move up to Level 4 by the end of the academic year or else they won't be allowed to move to a College to study an academic subject in English. For eight weeks they study Level 2 English and then they take exams. If they average 65% or more they move up to Level 3. If they don't they repeat Level 2.
When I met my first classes in September I realised that yet again students had been underestimated and that all that many of these intelligent students needed was motivated exposure to English in use, encouragement to use English and support when doing so. Unfortunately none of these conditions could be achieved by following the prescribed coursebook. Or rather none of them could be achieved by following the coursebook as a script. They might possibly be achieved though by making use of it as a resource.
The textbooks which I was given to use with different classes were Phillips (2003a, 2003b, 2003c). They are part of a Skills in English Course designed to prepare students 'for entry into English-medium study' and are no better and no worse than most other EAP textbooks that I have come across. Like most of those they lack, in my view, engaging content and stimulating activities and they could be significantly improved by taking heed of the words of Mol and Bin (2008), who, in a chapter on EAP materials, say that, 'the affective aspect of learning needs to be taken into account in the design of activities and materials. Suggestions for teachers should be included with regards to motivating students, maximizing their cognitive and affective engagement in the materials.'
A respondent to a questionnaire on EAP materials in Tomlinson and Masuhara (2008) said she wanted 'something not as dry' when asked what new EAP materials she wanted and I felt the same when I first glanced through the textbooks I was given to use at SQU. I was reminded of the following comment in Tomlinson and Masuhara about EAP textbooks (2008): "It is striking that all the teachers seem to be aware of the essential criteria for effective materials and that they do not consider that published materials match these criteria. I wonder how difficult it would be for publishers to re-design their courses so that they provide the flexibility and the potential for personalisation and engagement which the students need and the teachers want." Having said that though, I should point out that the Skills in English series was 'Highly Commended' in the Duke of Edinburgh's English-Speaking Union English Language Award 2004 and that it had been selected by the teachers at SQU as being more suitable than the other EAP series on the market. I should also say that teachers tell me that at the higher levels the texts in the Skills in English series are more cognitively and affectively engaging.
When I started to use the textbooks I quickly found that, although the linguistic and skills syllabus might approximate to what the students needed, the texts and activities were unlikely to stimulate or engage the students. In particular I identified the following specific problems:
- The books make the mistake of assuming that 'low level' learners need to first of all focus on mastering low level skills and therefore only very rarely engage the intelligent eighteen year old students in using such high level skills as inferencing, interpretation, problem solving and creation.
- The texts are typically 'dry' and have little potential for achieving cognitive and affective engagement.
- Many of the texts and the activities have little relevance to eighteen year old university students in Oman (e.g. texts on Romeo and Juliet and Guy Fawkes Night in England and tasks involving decisions about extra curricular activities and summer jobs).
- Many of the activities are meaninglessly mechanical and are unlikely to motivate students or help them to achieve deep processing of language input.
- Each unit follows exactly the same format and the same exercise types are monotonously repeated over and over again
- Many of the constantly repeated exercise types are of little potential value (e.g. matching paragraphs to topic sentences)
- Many of the activities are testing what the students can do rather than providing them with opportunities for learning (e.g. minimal pair drills without any prior listening; grammar activities asking questions which can't be answered from any available evidence)
- Most of the activities include no cognitive challenge
Does this sound familiar to any teacher of EAP 'low level' students reading this article?
In Tomlinson (2003: 163) I defined a humanistic coursebook as 'one which respects its users as human beings and helps them to exploit their capacity for learning through meaningful experience.' Clearly the coursebooks I was given at SQU are not humanistic coursebooks according to this definition and I set out to humanise them by 'adding activities which help to make the language learning process a more affective experience and finding ways of helping the learners to connect what is in the book to what is in their minds' (Tomlinson 2003a: 163). Here are some of the ways I used to try to achieve this:
The textbooks are very serious and there are few attempts at humour and even fewer opportunities for fun. In order to lighten the experience for the students I subverted some of the serious and mechanical activities by reducing them to the absurd.
For example, I replaced the following minimal pair drill with the silly local story which follows it:
B Work in pairs. Say the words below. Make sure your partner can hear the difference.
- go Joe
- get jet
- ago age
- wag wage
- rig ridge
- colleague college
- gust just
- goose juice
- leg ledge
- angle angel
N.B. In the textbook there are illustrations of some of the more difficult words (e.g. a picture of an angel).
Yesterday was a very strange day. I was flying in a jet coming in to Muscat when I looked out of the window. We were flying very low over the Crown Plaza Hotel and I could see a woman looking at Qurum Beach from a ledge. On the beach a man was walking along when suddenly a gust of wind blew his hat off and blew his umbrella into the sea. In the distance out at sea I could see an oil rig and as I was looking at it a goose flew at great speed past our plane.
When we landed at Al Seeb I saw a dog sitting in Starbucks drinking an orange juice. It was wagging its tail. What a strange day!
The story was easily visualisable because of all the local references and it gave a more meaningful experience of the problematic minimal pair than the drill would have done. After listening to the story the students answered questions which gave them not only opportunities to think for themselves but to use the problematic phonemes (e.g. Why do you think the dog was wagging its tail?). The students in circles then made up silly stories themselves using all the words from the drill. The students had fun, were delighted with their creativity and got just as much practice of using the problematic sounds as they would have done in the drill.
In another lesson I replaced the rather tedious activity of recounting a day in their life at university with a creative writing activity in which they imagined they were one of the animals from a minimal pair activity in the same unit and then described their typical day at, for example, Cat College or the Barking Language Centre. Again they had fun, were given an opportunity to be creative in English and practised the structures and vocabulary of routines in a more interesting way.
Another subversion involved me doing ridiculous mimes to help the students experience the 'red words' at the beginning of each unit, which they were supposed to learn from the dictionary. For example, instead of trying to remember definitions and translations of 'flying' and 'climbing' they could remember images of me flying across the classroom and climbing up the classroom wall.
Many of the questions in the textbooks can be answered by using the words from a listening or reading text the students have already been 'taught'. For example, in a unit about science all the 'why' questions (e.g. "Why is the sea blue?") could be answered directly from the reading text. I humanised the why question activity by adding problems with no apparent answers:
Why did a man sitting at a table in a restaurant suddenly catch fire?
Why did an orange juice suddenly explode on an outside café table?
Why did hundreds of snakes suddenly fall from the sky in Sri Lanka?
The students really enjoyed the challenge and came up with a variety of both scientifically sound explanations and ludicrously silly ones (e.g. "He asked the waiter to make his curry hot."). The students were actually using the language rather than just practising it.
Students typically seem to be interested in the teacher as a human being and relate willingly to anecdotes about the teacher's life. I took advantage of this by telling and making up numerous stories about myself in relation to the themes of the coursebook. For example, when the textbook was focusing on the Middle East, I added a reading text called 'Brian in the Middle East', which told the story of my visits to countries in the Middle East. And when the focus was on Shakespeare's tragedies I added a text by Shakespeare called the 'Life of Brian' and I told the students one morning the story of the terrible tragedy of Liverpool losing 3-1 to Reading (they all knew that I'm a fanatical Liverpool supporter and they sometimes for 'homework' watched a Liverpool game on TV). I also wrote a text about all the jobs that I've done in my life to supplement a unit on jobs.
Often I got the students to personalise texts and themes too and got them, for example, to write an imaginary story about their travels in Europe, to give me a made up account of a typical Monday in their life as a university student in England, to become one of the people in a textbook text or photo and explain why they did something and to teach me a game they liked to play.
Most of the events and places described in the textbook are inevitably located at a huge distance from the students. It is undeniably useful for the textbook to take students to places they have never been to but I like to start and finish a lesson in the minds of the students. So a useful readiness activity (Tomlinson 2003b) for a unit on horse-racing in Sienna was an activity getting students to visualise camel racing in Muscat and then to tell me about it. And a useful development activity (Tomlinson 2003b) after a unit on the physical world was for the students to describe the landscape of their home region in Oman.
Other localisations included:
- Getting students to play from written instructions a West African board game, which is very similar to a game popular in Oman
- Getting students to list healthy and unhealthy foods typically eaten in Oman before doing a unit on healthy eating
- Including local places in examples made up to illustrate vocabulary use
- Drawing parallels with local customs and stories to help the students to understand alien concepts (e.g. relating the witches in Macbeth to the stories of black magic in the Oman town of Bahla)
None of the activities in the textbook cater at all for kinaesthetic learners so I added a lot of activities involving physical action in response to linguistic prompts. For example:
- I got one half of the class to be Capulets and the other to be Montagues and they then acted out the story of Romeo and Juliet as I read it out from the textbook.
- I got them to act out, to repeat and to continue a story about strange aliens called 'They Came from the Sea – Part 1' (Tomlinson 2001) after listening to two of my published science fiction stories (Tomlinson 1999; Tomlinson and Masuhara 1994) with which I had supplemented a unit on space travel.
- We played a very physical game called 'Newspaper Hockey' (Tomlinson 2001) as a supplement to the textbook unit on games.
I also often supplemented the textbook activities with what I call 'development activities' (Tomlinson 2003b), that is with activities which require the students to go back and understand a text more deeply before engaging in a production activity which develops the text in a different way. For example, after reading a text about Bahrain as it is today I got them to use the clues in the text to help them to write a description of Bahrain in 2050. And, after reading a supplementary poem about a neglectful mother and a supplementary newspaper article about a mother who allowed her son to become obese through eating junk food, I asked the students in pairs to write a poem or story called, 'The Good Mother of Oman'. The texts they produced were often and inevitably full of grammatical errors but they were inventive (e.g. one 'good mother' gave her son money when he ate healthy food and took it away when he ate junk food). And producing such texts helped students to increase their self-esteem.
Other supplementations included:
- Setting riddles at the beginning of a class related to the theme of the unit (e.g. asking, 'What has a mouth but no eyes, no ears and no mouth?' at the beginning of a lesson on physical features
- Getting students to draw their representation of a text before answering the textbook questions on it (e.g. drawing what they can remember seeing when they 'visited' Sienna for the horse races described in the textbook)
- Adding texts about a personality known to the students to reinforce a structure being practised (e.g. a text about Stevie Gerrard's typical day as Liverpool captain to illustrate one of the uses of the simple present).
I can't claim it was easy to humanise the Level 1 textbooks in the Skills in English series. I had to make use of all my experience and imagination. And I certainly can't claim that the students dramatically improved their ability to use English accurately, fluently, appropriately and effectively. However I think I can claim that many of the students became more positive about English, that they gained confidence from their increased self-esteem and that some of them started to seek out opportunities to experience and to use English outside the classroom.
I retired today as a teacher. I'm really going to miss the stimulus of the classroom, the buzz of energy that can be created, the fun that can be had with students. I'm also really going to miss the sense of achievement when students progress and develop. But I'm not really going to miss teaching an EAP class with an EAP textbook.
Mol, H. and Bin, T. B. 2008. 'EAP materials in Australia and New Zealand. In B. Tomlinson (ed.) English Language Teaching Materials. London: Continuum.
Philips, T. 2003a. Skills in English – Reading Level 1. Reading: Garnet Education.
Philips, T. 2003b. Skills in English – Speaking Level 1. Reading: Garnet Education.
Philips, T. 2003c. Skills in English – Listening Level 1. Reading: Garnet Education.
Tomlinson, B. 1999. Superbird. Cambridge Readers Level 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tomlinson, B. 2001. 'They Came from the Sea' and 'Newspaper Hockey'. In Watcyn-Jones, P. (ed.) Top Class Activities 2. London: Penguin
Tomlinson, B. 2003a. 'Humanising the coursebook.' In B. Tomlinson (ed.) Developing Materials for Language Teaching. London: Continuum, 162-173.
Tomlinson, B. 2003b. 'Frameworks for materials development.' In B. Tomlinson (ed.) Developing Materials for Language Teaching. London: Continuum, 107-129.
Tomlinson, B. 2006. 'Localising the global: Matching materials to the context of learning.' In J. Mukundan (ed.), Readings on ELT Materials II. Petaling Jaya: Pearson Malaysia, 1-16.
Tomlinson, B. (ed.) 2008. English Language Teaching Materials. London: Continuum.
Tomlinson, B. and Masuhara, H. 1994. Use Your English. Tokyo: Asahi Press.
Tomlinson, B. and Masuhara, H. 2008. 'Materials used in the UK.' In B. Tomlinson (ed.) English Language Teaching Materials. London: Continuum.
Please check the Making the Most of a Coursebook course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Certificate in Teaching English to Business People course at Pilgrims website.
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