Session 6-7 Coursebook evaluation and selection

Session 6-7
SKILLS
I.

The four skills: Accuracy or Fluency?

Task 1

Do you agree with the following statements?

1. Language proficiency can be defined in terms of accuracy and fluency.
2. In planning a unit of teaching, it is useful to separate the two aspects
(accuracy and fluency) and define the learning objective at any given point in
a lesson.
3. The teaching of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar will tend to be
fluency-oriented.
4. In teaching the four skills, the emphasis will usually be firmly on fluency.
5. Listening or reading texts are used in coursebooks for accuracy.

Task 2

Categorize the following statements into two: accuracy and fluency activities
1. Tasks often simulate real-life situations.
2. Texts are usually used as they would be in real life: dialogues are spoken,
articles, and written stories are read.
3. Tasks do not usually simulate real-life situations.
4. Texts may be used in any mode (skill), regardless of how they are used in
real life (dialogues may be written, written texts used for listening).
5. The texts are usually composed of separate (discrete) items: sentences or
words.
6. Performance is assessed on how well ideas are expressed or understood.
7. The texts are usually whole pieces of discourse: conversations, stories, etc.
8. Performance is assessed on how few language mistakes are made.

Task 3

1. Together with a partner, determine the criteria to evaluate the ways the skills
are presented in coursebooks.
2. Compare your ideas with those suggested by Cunningsworth (1995) on p. 38.
II.

Listening

Listening material & strategies

Task 4

Answer the following questions with a partner:

1. Can you list as many situations as you can think of where people are listening
to other people in Vietnamese? (Refer to p. 40)
2. What are the uses of listening material? Can it be used on its own right or is
it used to reinforce a grammatical structure?
3. What kind of listening material can be found in coursebooks?
4. How are listening tasks organized? (Refer to p. 40 for more ideas.)
5. When working on listening in the classroom, do you think it makes more
sense to start with work on the small pieces (e.g. sounds and words and
details) or on the big pieces (e.g. background topics, the overall structure
and organization of a text, the general meaning, etc.)?

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6. What are some factors that you have to consider when evaluating the
listening skill in a coursebook?

(Cunningsworth, 1995: 67)

Types of activities

Task 5

Go through the list of Types of listening activities taken from Ur (1996: 113-114)
below. Mark activity types that seem useful to you. Then look at a coursebook
that you are familiar with, and see how many of these are represented. Are there
many that are totally neglected? Are there others that are over-used?
Types of Listening Activities

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Adapting coursebook listening activities

Task 6

Below are descriptions of three listening tasks, each accompanied by the

listening texts. What might you do to improve or vary them to suit a class you
teach? Can you find out any possible problems?
(Ur, 1996: 105)

(Ur, 1996: 108)

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Listening activity 1 (Adapting coursebook)

Listening activity 2

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Listening activity 3

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III.

SPEAKING
Successful speaking activity

Task 7

1. On your own, tick which items on the following list are characteristics of a
successful speaking activity.
2. Share the results with a partner.
a. Learners are often inhibited about trying to say things in a foreign
language in the classroom.
b. They cannot think of anything to say.
c. As much as possible of the period of time allotted to the activity is in
fact occupied by learner talk.
d. In classes where all the learners share the same mother tongue, they
may tend to use it.
e. All get a chance to speak, and contributions are fairly evenly
distributed.
f. Learners are eager to speak because they are interested in the topic
and have something new to say about it, or because they want to
contribute to achieving a task objective.
g. Some learners seem to dominate, while others speak very little or not
at all.
h. Learners express themselves in utterances that are relevant, easily
comprehensible to each other, and of an acceptable level of language
accuracy.

Communicative activities

Task 8

1. Consider some notions that have to do with communication:

a. Communicative activities are classroom activities designed to set
learners to speak and listen to one another.
b. We typically communicate when one of us has information that
another does not have.
c. The aim of a communicative activity in class is to get learners to use
the language they are learning to interact in realistic and meaningful
ways, usually involving exchanges of information or opinion.
2. Which of the following list is a communicative activity?
a. Repeating sentences that you say
b. Doing oral grammar drills
c. Reading aloud from the coursebook
d. Giving a prepared speech
e. Acting out a scripted conversation
f. Giving instructions so that someone can use a new machine
g. Improvising a conversation so that it includes lots of examples of a
new grammar structure
h. One learner describes a picture in the textbook while the others look
at it.
3. In coursebooks, the following two oral fluency activities are often found. Try
them out in two groups, one after the other, allowing about five minutes for
each. The other groups will act as observers by keeping an eye on how

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things are going: how much people are talking, the kind of language they are
using, how interested and motivated they seem to be.
4. Can you find out the difference between the two activities performed? Which
one is topic-based and which one is task-based?

Task 9

1. Consider the following communicative activity types taken from Scrivener

(2005: 153-155) and Ur (1995: 131-133). See how much you have used or
found in coursebooks.
2. Then consider the two extracts from two coursebooks that follow. See how
they present the speaking activity. Can you see any communicative activity
(mentioned in 1) represented? Any activity that is different from those
presented?
3. Can you work out guidelines for evaluating the speaking skill in coursebooks?

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(Scrivener, 2005)

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(Ur, 1995)
Examples from Coursebooks
1. High Season: English for the Hotel and Tourist Industry

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2. Reward Pre-Intermediate

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IV.

READING
Criteria for assessing reading material

Task 10

Together with a partner, answer the following questions:

1. What are some purposes in which reading texts can be used in coursebooks?
2. What are some general criteria that we can rely on to evaluate the reading
content?
3. When analyzing the reading texts, what should we need to know?
4. From your experience, what are of some types or genres of text that can be
found in coursebooks?
Choosing reading activities

Task 11

Which of the following seem to be useful reading activities and which not? Why?
Briefly develop an alternative procedure for the less satisfactory ones.
1. The class reads a whole page of classified advertisements in the newspaper,
using their dictionaries to check up all unknown words.
2. Students each have a copy of the Guardian Weekly newspaper. Ask them to
find the word over somewhere on the front page.
3. Place a pile of local tourist leaflets on the table and explain that students, in
groups of four, can plan a day out tomorrow.
4. Students read a short extract from a novel and answer five multiple-choice
comprehension questions about fine points of detail.

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Task 12

1. In Boxes 10.121-3, taken from Ur (1995:151-153), are three examples of

texts in English for intermediate readers. Do you have any comments on
these three examples?
2. Compare your comments with those from Ur (1995).

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V.

WRITING
Uses of writing

Task 13

Tell whether the following writing activities are used as a means or an end or
both.
1. Learners write a response to the reading of a controversial newspaper article
2. Learners note down new vocabulary.
3. Learners practice specific written forms at the level of word or sentence.
4. Write out answers to reading or listening comprehension questions.
5. Learners are invited to express themselves using their own words.
6. Learners write anecdotes to illustrate the meaning of idioms.
7. Learners write argumentative essays.
Kinds of writing activities

Task 14

1. What are the kinds of writing activities that can be found in coursebooks? Are
they of the controlled kind or unguided kind?
2. What conventions of different sort of writing (i.e. genres) are frequently
found in coursebooks?
3. What kind of emphasis should be given to the following kinds of writing
work? Accuracy or Fluency?

4. What kinds of knowledge should students be equipped with if they want to

write an English essay?

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Evaluation of textbook writing activities

Task 15

1. From your experience, what makes a writing activity successful?

2. Are the criteria shown in the box below acceptable to you? Would you omit
or change any of them, add more?

3. Read the following types of writing tasks and Urs comments that follow
(1995). See how much you agree with his. What types of writing tasks
should have been included if writing is considered to be an end by itself?

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