Interview

Peter Viney

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On Publications

How did you get into writing course textbooks?
The same way that everyone else does. I was dissatisfied with the material I was teaching. I was teaching at Anglo-Continental in Bournemouth, England. When I started there in 1971, the school already had a research and development department and its own recording studio. My first boss was Colin Granger (Generation 2000 author) and he used to write stuff, we'd record it at lunchtime and use it in the afternoon. His material was always funny and lively. So I always expected to write material.

This policy continued when Bernie and I were testing ideas for Streamline. We'd write it, have it typed, letrasetted and illustrated. We'd record it the next day, duplicate tapes, and teach it. Our brief was to prepare something that could be used both by very experienced teachers and by very inexperienced teachers. The first pilot version was heavily illustrated (there's lots about the original version on our website). Streamline spawned so many other projects - higher levels, the graded reading scheme, then eventually the videos - that it became a full time occupation just after Connections was published.

You've been writing course books since the 80's. What aspects of course design has remained the same? What changes have you experienced?
I've been through plenty of changes myself. The materials I was writing just before Streamline were functionally-arranged, and Streamline was a return to a careful structural progression after trying it in other ways. We've seen trends come into ELT, and they don't then “go”, they leave a mark and become absorbed into the broader concept we have of the syllabus. By the time we started on Grapevine, and Main Street, we were bringing in a more balanced skills approach.

The “back to grammar” trend in the late 80s influenced us into having fuller grammar summaries and more explicit focus. Learner autonomy ideas were influential on Grapevine, and even more so on Main Street. Video materials were important too. In the 90s we became convinced that communication skills could shape the syllabus, and the result was Handshake, which hasn't had the world-shattering success we'd hoped for. I still think it's just ahead of its time.

The structural syllabus hasn't changed that much overall. Books look better, but I so often see splashy photos from CD-ROM royalty-free photo collections all over textbooks. There's a German CD-ROM of business people in photos that gets into every book I pick up. The point is that these stock photos don't do much. Illustrations are a vital resource. They should be rich in exploitable detail and should explain as well as look pretty. So you have to commission art and photography.

We used professional actors in photos in Survival, Basic Survival and Handshake. It might not be the prize-winning artistic photo, but it shows what you want it to show. I shake my head when I see things like a huge photo of a bee taking up 70% of the page with six questions about work below. The illustration has done nothing except create a good initial impression. If I need to explain "bee" to a class, I only have to say "buzz."

Textbooks are unjustly maligned by some teacher trainers, which does no one, teachers or students, a service. Students spend a precious and finite number of hours in an English course, and it's only by having some kind of carefully thought out procedure and progression that the effect can be maximised. Trainers encourage trainees to “do their own thing” and they should … sometimes.

But too often topical material that is taken into the classroom results in the teacher explaining vocabulary most of the time. You need to assess your own material in comparison with a textbook. The textbook will (or rather should) be recycling vocabulary and structures in a way that can't happen with one-off pieces of material. Eventually, you might gather a selection of great one-off lessons that you can present in a logical order, but then you've already started writing your own book.

Streamline is the core text for one of the biggest conversation schools in Japan. Are you surprised that a book written in the 80's is still being used today?
"American Streamline" was written in the early 80s, but it's based on the British "Streamline English" which was actually written in the late 70s. "Streamline English" is still being used in its British edition in Europe too, and its older. I'm gratified and honoured that "American Streamline" is still being used, yes. Surprised? No. It works. No one goes up to a singer and says "I'm surprised the radio is still playing your hit song from 1982". The original book was tested over two years with 3000 students, in monolingual and multilingual situations with many language groups. That's why it works. I spend my days trying to think of new contexts and ways of teaching things, but when it comes down to a context for the simple past of regular verbs, while including all three pronunciations of the –ed endings and all the spelling rules, I still can't come up with anything as complete and neat as "Willy the Kid." It's a timeless context which hasn't dated.

Because we used a lot of fiction / media based contexts, they haven't aged too badly. Elton Kash can still be used with a smile, while later “hot musicians” used in other books at the time have dated themselves out of existence. Contexts on groups like ABC, Ultravox, New Kids on The Block or whoever are of no interest to a new generation. An over-the-top sitcom figure survives much better.

The thing about Streamline is that the student was provided with what they needed for that lesson and no more. The meat of the course was in the Teacher's Book. This left the teacher free to choose how to present the material. Teachers are not left slogging through exercises A1.1 (a) to D8. 3 (e) in the order they're printed in the textbook. The Streamline Teacher's Book is prescriptive in tone, because that saves a lot of space. But the students can't see the Teacher's Book. You can teach it however you want. I'd happily teach from it tomorrow.

"New American Streamline" was a thorough update in 1995, and I was delighted with the results. I wish OUP would do the same to the British version, but they won't.

I'm so heavily identified with "Streamline" that it's sometimes good to be asked about something else. Recently I was in a bookshop, and was introduced by name to a young teacher. I was delighted when he said, "Oh, yes! The author of Handshake!"

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