ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Peter Viney

Curtis Kelly

Chuck Sandy

Panelists: Peter | Marc | Curtis | Chuck
Date: February 2005

Topic: "What ELT books influenced you most as a teacher?"

Marc Helgesen

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ELT books that influenced you? Hmm. This is pretty tough, especially for a panel like ours. Most of us have been teaching English since Kitty-chan was, uh, a kitten. A long time.

A basic rule of writing is to know both your audience and your purpose. Am I writing to remember and pay homage? To explore how I become the teacher I am? To give advice?

Books along the way all played ­ and continue to play ­ a role.

My earliest books were by people like Mary Finocchairo, Christana Bratt Paulston & Mary Bruder. Important for me. So that's a bit of remembrance. It's also past tense. Ignore it.

“ The late 70's and early 80's was the time of a paradigm shift: the heady days of the communicative revolution.”

When I think of books that were important for me early on, I think of the late 70's and early 80's. This was the time of a paradigm shift: the heady days of the communicative revolution (for those weren't teaching in those days, this period followed the communicative insurgency). Earl Stevick's A way and Ways explored alternative paths for teaching. It was the first book that inspired me to write a "fan" letter to the author. Later his Images and Options was an important learning, too. Alan Maley and Alan Duff's Drama Techniques and Viola Spolin's Improvisation opened my eyes to the range of options I have. This is an acknowledgement of what made me the teacher I am.

Peter (and he is absolutely correct) suggests that textbooks are more important that linguistics books. Curtis (and he is absolutely correct) looks more toward the overall knowledge a craftworker needs. I figure it starts from tools (and I am absolutely… out of words in this paragraph).

The first courses
The Strategies series (Starting Strategies (later Opening Strategies), Developing Strategies, Building Strat's, etc. - Brian Abbs and Ingrid Freebairn, 1979, Longman) and the Cambridge English Course (Michael Swan and Catherine Walter, 1984, CUP).

I came to Japan in 1982. I quickly learned that much of what I learned in grad school was either irrelevant or just plain wrong. I happened (just luck) to come to a very good eikaiwa school. They assigned the Strategies series for me to teach. These were sort of the second round of early "communicative" books. The first round was a mess in terms of curriculum. People were still trying to understand what the new approach meant. These books started to understand the complex nature of tasks and the complex nature of language. I credit these courses with teaching me how to teach EFL: Brian Abbs, Ingrid Freebairn, Michael Swan, Katherine Walter. Brilliant teachers (homage).

A little background. Strategies was British English. So was the Cambridge English Course. Back then, all the good EFL courses were. American publishing was ESL ­ it assumed immigrants. British EFL grew up in their world-wide empire (or what was left of it). I don't want to justify history. But the BrEng books were simply better for what we were trying to do. A lot of North American teachers refused to even try them. Bad idea. Later, in no small part because of independent publishers in places like Japan, there came to be a lot of EFL-appropriate books in American English. It gave people like me our break.

A couple things I learned:

• Like Peter, I am suggesting that coursebooks train a lot more teachers than MA-TESOL courses, or even a CELTA/DELTA/TEFL In'tl certificate course ever will. And coursebooks are tempered by classroom reality. If it don't fly, people don't buy.
• Given what coursebooks are and can be, have a look at the Teacher's Manual. There is usually a lot there for teachers at nearly every level.
• Don't get uptight about surface stuff like dialect. Look at the activity design.
• If you don't like the materials you find available, write something better.
• Steve Brown, my co-author on lots of books including English Firsthand and Active Listening, did a retrospective plenary where he looked back at Strategies and one of our books. You can read that here. (The Steve Brown who is president of JALT is a different person. For information on the "Steve Brown confusion", click here.)

What books do I consider important now? Like a lot of teachers, I've got an office with bookshelves lined with hundreds of books. There are only a few that I keep on my desk, rather than on shelves. Perhaps this is for "evaluation by proximity" ­ if I want to always have them less than a meter away, they must be important. So this part is advice.

The books on my desk
A dictionary. I happen to like the Longman Dictionary of Language and Culture, but must admit I hardly use any dictionaries anymore. On google.com, you can type "define: (the word)" to get any meaning you want. Doesn't help with spelling but usually that is just a matter of trying one or two guesses.

Practical English Usage
3/ed. Michael Swan, 2005, Oxford (see OUP catalog)
Nearly everyone already knows this ­ or at least they should. The usage discussions on the ETJ discussion list often contain questions that could easily be answered simply by looking it up in Swan.

I like PEU for a lot of reasons. The explanations are clear. They can help learners understand how the grammar of English works. Also, things are easy to access. If you want to know the difference between the usage of must and have to, you can look up modal auxiliary verbs. Or you can look up must or have to. Important point: Don't buy this book just yet. There is a new edition coming soon. (Next month, maybe. See the link above). It will be based on what we are learning from corpus data about how the language actually works. I haven't seen it yet but know that the current edition was enough of an improvement from the earlier one to make it worth buying. I am sure the is one will be too.

The Owner's Manual for the Brain: Everyday applications from mind-brain research
2/ed. Pierce J. Howard, 2000, Bard Press (available from Amazon)
I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how my students process information and how I do. And how I can present information in a way they can make use of it. This book is a godsend. It explains brain research in a way we mere mortals (as opposed to neurology researchers who are simultaneously brilliant and unable to write comprehensibly) can understand. And each section includes applications and ways to experiment with the information. It has helped me with everything from how to explain communicative rapport to figuring out what color of carpet we should put in the conversation classroom (blue, with some red accents around the room).

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Panelists: Peter | Marc | Curtis | Chuck

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