ESL Textbook Evaluation Assignment: Middle School English 2, South Korea

I am an ESL teacher in South Korea and enrolled in a TESOL masters program. The following essay assignment evaluates the textbook Middle School English 2 (Korea). It is the book that is used by all Korean public middle school students, grade 2, countrywide. This review is based on criteria of good materials outlined by Brian Tomlinson in the introduction to his book Materials Development in Language Teaching (which is one of the most interesting textbooks I have ever been required to read).

Materials Should Provide Impact and Materials Should Take Into Account That learners Differ In Affective Attitudes: Middle School English 2 has novel content including unusual topics and activities. There are 12 chapters in the book. The titles of the four chapters I am the most impressed with are: Beauty is Only Skin-deep, I Wish There Were No Pollution, Women in Sports and Let's Look on the Bright Side.

In the chapter Beauty is Only Skin-deep, the book addresses the fact teenagers are often not satisfied with their appearance, feeling among other things too fat or too ugly, and how these feelings can have a negative effect on their daily lives and emotional well being. This is a universal theme for teenagers and is a topic that is of interest to them because they are always looking in the mirror and talking about their looks at school. The chapter also addresses that sometimes life seems unfair and that it may seem that other students have an advantage that you deserve. In the book they specifically mention, "I'm better at computer programming than Laura, but she is the leader of our computer club" (p.49). The chapter dialog and exercises focus on talking about your situations to your friends and adults close to you and giving advice. In this chapter the book gives the students insight that they are not alone in feeling this way and that despite their feelings of inadequacy they are worthy of love and good grades.

The chapter I Wish There Were No Pollution addresses environmental awareness. It addresses air and water pollution and warns if we are not careful that the wild life and clean air and water will become irreparably damaged. The first page of the chapter makes a local reference and features a beautiful nature scene of the Dong River in South Korea surrounded by lush green mountains (p.97). Further on in the chapter is a shocking illustration in which people are walking around the city wearing oxygen tanks. The dialog beneath the illustration is between a husband and wife and reads (p.103):

A: Honey I'm home.

B: How was your day?

A: It was a long day.

B: Take off you air tank.

A: I hate carrying this air tank on my back.

The photographs in this chapter are graphic and in stark contrast to the beautiful opening photo of the Dong River. The pictures show heaps of dead fish in floating in a lake, piles of trash on a beach, smoke stacks emitting black streams of pollution and a cute little bird woefully covered in oil (p. 99, 106, 112).

The chapter Women in Sports is especially exciting as Korea has traditionally been a male dominated society with distinct gender roles. However the younger generation is experiencing the gender equality their grandparents never did and women have careers in math and science, are getting married later in life and as this chapter points out playing sports. The pictures and illustrations show women playing soccer, baseball and golf, lifting weights, competitively swimming and doing gymnastics (p. 117, 118, 124-5). The main story in this chapter focuses on Women's World Cup soccer (p.124-5). This is a topic of interest to the students as it is their favorite sport.

Let's Look on the Bright Side is an unusual topic because it is psychologically based. Teenagers can relate to it because they are prone to depressive thoughts. Dialog 1 pictures a student who has received a "D" on their math test and in Dialog 2 one of the girls says "I hate myself" (p.176-7). In both the dialogs their friends suggest they look on the bright side and that things are bound to get better. The two stories in the chapter focus on Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein (p.179-80). Each of these famous people experienced failures but as a result of their determination had amazing achievements.

Middle School English 2 provides a variety of single student and pair work activities including: constructed response, extended response, integrative items, multiple choice, open ended questions and short answer exercises but little to no discovery exercises. There are also single student, pair and group work exercises including: a dialog completion board game, listening tasks, letter writing and interviewing.

The impact factors that Middle School English 2 lacks are: interesting fonts and white spaces.

Materials Should Help Learners Feel At Ease: Middle School English 2 makes a good effort at helping learners feel at ease. As I mentioned in the last segment, Middle School English 2 lacks "lots of white space" (Tomlinson p.8) however it makes up for this in other areas. Middle School English 2 is designed for Korean students and provides "texts and illustrations that they can relate to their own culture" (Tomlinson p. 8). In previous ESOL texts I have used there is excessive use of English names. These names are difficult for the students to pronounce and I think their time is better spent learning vocabulary needed for dialog. Middle School English 2 balances the name factor and helps learners feel at ease by using half Han-guk (the name of the Korean language) and half English names.

Many of the pictures throughout the book are from Korea too, for example: the airport, the bus stop and the movie theater. Local cuisine, for example: kim chi and bulgogi, are included in stories, dialogs and photographs. There is also a chapter on Korean and American Holidays. The one downfall of Middle School English 2 in this regard is that while many pictures feature East Asian people all the illustrations depict white foreigners; even the characters with Korean names are illustrated this way. I think the book does the students a disservice in this way. The book should take the opportunity to expose the children to integration and diversity, and depict many skin colors together as friends.

As Middle School English 2 was created for specifically for Korean students and written by Koreans. It is inclusive and does not signal "intellectual, linguistic or cultural superiority over the learners. The use of Han-guk is not excessive but is consistently present throughout the book, for some directions and vocabulary.

The dialog in this book succeeds in featuring informal discourse, though not authentic. Dialogs use casual and updated vernacular including the use of contractions and idioms. New vocabulary is presented in small chunks at the bottom of the story pages and provides the Korean word and the phonetic pronunciation along with the English word or phrase.

Learners Must Be Ready to Acquire the Points Being Taught: Middle School English 2 is part of a three book series for middle school students. The advantage of using a series such as this is that "learners have achieved readiness" needed "to learn developmental features" (Tomlinson p. 11). They have already completed the building blocks for Middle School English 2 by completing Middle School English 1. Middle School English 2 does a good job of not "selecting a particular point for teaching". In fact it rarely directly addresses grammar points at all, instead integrating them into the chapter.

Materials Should Permit a Silent Period at the Beginning of Instruction: Middle School English 2 is exemplary when it comes to permitting a silent period at the beginning of instruction and does "not force premature speaking in the target language" (Tomlinson p. 19). Each chapter begins with a series of listening exercises. The first page of all chapters is an attractive full page photograph with a few new phrases that will be used in the chapter at the bottom of the page. When students turn that page the first words they see at the top of the second page is "Just Listen". The "Just Listen" section of the chapter includes three silent period segments: Look and Listen, Listen to the Dialog and Listen and Check.

The first segment "Look and Listen" provides two pictures with titles, giving students a preview of what is forthcoming in the lesson. Students listen to a recording that describes the illustrations.

The second segment is "Listen to the dialog". This section also has two parts and two illustrations: it includes a couple of sentences next to the pictures. Students listen to the dialogs. These dialogs are not verbatim of the dialogs to come but utilize vocabulary and phrases that are presented later in the chapter.

The third segment of the "Just Listen" section is called "Listen and Check". This is an interactive exercise that honors the silent period necessary for students. In this segment students listen to three recordings and answer the posed question by circling a multiple choice answer. This segment is variable. Sometimes the multiple choice answers are depicted with pictures or illustrations and sometimes the answers are written in Han-guk, there are also true and false questions and English answers.

What Is Being Taught Should Be Perceived By Learners As Relevant and Useful, Materials Should Require and Facilitate Learner Self-Investment: Materials that provide discovery lessons and facilitate learner self-investment are the new generation of coursebooks. Middle School English 2 is not one of them as it was published in 2001. These kinds of activities require not only guidance from a coursebook but facilitation from a teacher who has been trained in these methods.

It's difficult for me to suggest what I would do to apply this principal to this as I am just learning about these techniques myself. However, I would integrate Participatory Learning methods into this to facilitate learner self-investment. One activity would be for students, in small groups after reading the chapters' story, to write their own story questions. Each group could then take turns leading the class in a question and answer time. As the teacher, I would facilitate by asking additional probing questions based on the students original question to help them create some authentic dialog.

Materials Should Expose the Learners to Language in Authentic Use, Materials Should Not Rely Too Much On Controlled Practice, Materials Should Help Learners to Develop Confidence: One of the weaknesses of Middle School English 2 is the lack of authentic use and overreliance on controlled teacher dependant practice which results in the learners lack of confidence. Just ask any teenager for help with directions or with a shopkeeper and you can see that the majority are not confident about their English. Dialogs and discourse producing exercises rely heavily on cloze and chart filling exercises. I give Middle School English 2 the credit it deserves as it has a variety of presentation of these exercises. There should be opportunity in this book for students to think for themselves, having an open discussion topic at the end of each chapter would help facilitate this. As the teacher it would not be too difficult to supplement this text to facilitate this.

The lack of opportunity for the students to formulate authentic dialog results in a lack of communicative competence and the majority of students cannot understand or produce English that is not Konglish. They do understand Konglish quite well and I know this because that is how I can communicate with them. I have requested that my co-teachers help me to enforce 10 minutes of English only time in class without much success in getting the support. Middle School English 2 does use authentic subject matter such as: Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, national holidays, names of international holidays and environmental degradation but the information on these subjects is authored by the text writers. As this book has accompanying audio and CD-ROM video authentic material could be easily added to the next edition.

I see my students one time for 45 minutes each week. In my attempt to have the students create and experience authentic dialog I asked the students to commit to 10 minutes of English only each class period. This idea created a positive externality and turned out to be a great classroom management technique as they had never been so quiet in class before.

Materials Should Take Into Account That Learners Differ in Learning Styles:

Middle School English 2 provides ample written language in both English and Han-guk. It also provides material for auditory (please refer to Materials Should Permit a Silent Period at the Beginning of Instruction), studial, global, dependent and independent learning styles while it lacks kinesthetic, experiential and analytic features.

This is a basic and has ample amounts of written language both in English and Han-guk at the expense of white space. Middle School English 2 favors studial styles of learning over experiential, I think because of cultural reasons. Studial students are stimulated at the end of each chapter in the review section, which contains written exercises. The content is teacher dependent for all but a few exercises that are done in pair or group work therefore there are few experiential exercises. Again I think the lack of independent exercise is due to cultural reasons. Thinking for yourself is not a dominant feature as it is in American culture, instead Koreans are more likely to follow the group and sacrifice their individuality for the sake of the group. This dynamic has served them well and was essential to their incredible economic progress since the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945.

Middle School English 2 has no Total Physical Response activities so students do no have opportunities for kinesthetic stimulus. Seeing as this book has integrated many modern learning paradigms into this book I think that the absence of these activities may be do to its publishing date of 2001. I teach elementary school students here in Korea with a government provided coursebook that is newer and is completely based on TPR activities. Perhaps subsequent versions of this book will incorporate kinesthetic stimulus.

Middle School English 2 is based on the global learning concept, but is not to be confused with a global coursebook which it is not. Very few analytic "discrete bits of the language" grammar points are presented, instead there are "whole chunks of language" presented (Tomlinson p. 17).

Materials Should Take Into Account That the Positive Effects of Instruction are Usually Delayed: Middle School English 2 subscribes to the "conventional Presentation, Practice, Production approach" (Tomlinson p. 16) therefore not taking "into account that the positive effects of instruction are usually delayed" (Tomlinson p.15). Quite frankly it is even hard for me to grasp that "learners cannot be expected to learn a new feature and be able to use it in the same lesson" although I have experienced when students "get a new feature correct in the lesson in which it is taught but then get it wrong the following week" (Tomlinson p. 16). I think that this book takes the Presentation, Practice, Production approach because it provides "a reassuring illusion of system, simplicity and progress" (Tomlinson p. 16). Learner delay could be taken into account in this book by providing periodic reviews throughout the chapters.

Conclusion: Middle School English 2 is actually a much better than I had originally given it credit for. While not on the pedagogical cutting edge it makes a good effort and utilizes modern teaching methods. Taking the time to evaluate Middle School English 2 based on Tomlinson's criteria enabled me to become friends with this book. It's a shame my last class utilizing this is tomorrow. Creating an analysis of the book is helpful for teachers. Realizing the strengths of this book made me feel more confident in its abilities. Realizing the pitfalls of this enables the teacher to focus their efforts on creating supplementary materials to fill in those gaps.

References:

Middle School English 2 (2001), South Korea.

Tomlinson, B. (Ed.). (1998). Materials development in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.