To Encourage And Help Teachers To Personalize And Localize The Content And Activities

By Author: Jack
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Another way of trying to satisfy diverse users of global coursebooks may be to respect the intelligence and experience of the learners and teachers and encourage and help them to personalize and localize the content and activities. Straightforward offers adult contents and encourages the learners to think and speak/write their responses. It also encourages the use of the Internet to connect the classroom with 'real life'. We like Just Right and Quick Smart English because they offer interesting extensive texts that can be exploited for localization, but regrettably the tasks that follow require intensive reading and it is difficult to break the fixed sequence. The teacher's book for Straightforward gives more than one suggestion for approaching presenting Cartier Replica Watches student book contents in class. We felt, however, that most of the courses offered little opportunity or encouragement for adapting the materials to the needs, wants, personalities, or styles of the learners or teachers. Suggestions for adaptation in the teacher's book would be welcomed for all ...
... the courses in order to increase the level of flexibility.

Trying to cater for different learning styles and preferences would be another way to satisfy any learners anywhere. Most of the courses, however, seem to focus on teaching discrete learning points that suit analytical learners, few of them provide activities for experiential learners, and none of them provide activities for kinaesthetic learners who prefer to learn through physical activity. The emphasis in most courses is on explicit teaching of declarative knowledge followed by controlled or guided practice (typical PPP: Presentation-Practice-Production). Furthermore, a lack of extended texts and tasks makes it very difficult for the teacher to try to cater for experiential learners by changing the order or focus of the activities. It seems to us that most of the courses are trying to provide flexibility by adding more and more separate components so that users can mix and match. Tomlinson et al. (2001) questioned the value and effectiveness of multi-component courses and warned against possible negative effects, such as writer and teacher exhaustion and unreasonable cost. The multi-component course seems to be here to stay and it now includes more sophisticated CD-ROMs, DVDs, and websites. If all users are privileged enough to be able to afford fast ITand bear the cost of expensive coursebook sets, such extras might be welcomed, but all the evaluators agree that this is not the norm at present. We noted some Replica Breitling fundamental problems with the multi-component course. First of all, the content maps are now very complicated, with information covering all the contents and components (see Total English, Quick Smart English, and Straightforward). As was mentioned in 'Publisher's claims' the Introduction and the blurb read more like a catalogue. These ready-made supplements are supposed to help the teachers to minimize their preparation time but finding out what is available could itself become another chore for teachers.

There seems to be a competition among the publishers to provide 'help for teachers', such as photocopiable extra materials, student portfolios, and test sheets. Total English and Innovations claim to offer authoring software for customizing tests. These tests, CD-ROMs, and DVDs, however, favour teaching and testing explicit and discrete knowledge. They are not suited for nurturing skills through experiential approaches, projects, and kinaesthetic activities, or for interactive face-to-face feedback, even though all of these approaches are recommended by researchers and methodologists in language learning (e.g. Tomlinson 1998; Ellis 2000; Doughty and Long 2003).