Returning to the matter of personal reactions to turkey bowling, it is also striking to me that the responses of students are nowhere envisioned in this unit. The only activity involves a cartoon of a man throwing a live turkey at some glass bottles and asks the students to find which rules of turkey bowling he is breaking. The unit then moves on to other topics. The fact that student response is ignored is of considerable moral significance and recalls my earlier discussion of voice. What students bring to the activity is irrelevant, as are their own reactions to what they read. In terms of the teacher-student relation, one side is silenced; there can be no relation through these kinds of materials. My guess is that many teachers would choose to add an activity or at least a discussion asking the students for their responses to the text, precisely to recapture the human dimension of the teacher-student relation; but nothing like this is included in the materials themselves. The reason for this omission can be seen in the title of this unit. It is headed: “Have To/Don’t Have To.” Other units are called “Personal Descriptions,” “Past Tense of ‘To Be,’” “Object Pronouns/Making a Telephone Call,” and so on. In other words, the book is arranged primarily according to grammatical structures and linguistic functions, which provide the coherence within each unit; this means that substantive topics shift within the units. The passage on turkey bowling is followed by an activity that asks “Make a list of things that students in your school have to and don’t have to do”; then there is a listening passage on another sport; then students are asked to make parallel sentences about another sport; then to talk in pairs about their responsibilities at home; and so on, all within the space of two pages. There is little or no thematic coherence here or elsewhere in the book. This fact reflects a dilemma that is not peculiar to textbook writers but rather is endemic to the entire enterprise of language teaching. On the one hand, we are supposed to teach language, and the most natural instinct historically has been to make this manageable by presenting the different structures (and, more recently, functions) of the language in sequence. The advantage of this is that it ensures that all the important structures are covered; it is also an approach favored by many students used to such
syllabi from more traditional language teaching contexts. On the other hand, however, language is quite meaningless if it is only form and if we have nothing to say or do with it. Language without content is empty. Several recent philosophies of teaching and learning (for example whole language or process writing) have stressed the need for all language use, including language use in language learning, to be about something; in ELT, the content-based movement has championed such an approach. This allows us to focus on the students’ responses—for example, to the turkey bowling text mentioned earlier. Yet this approach also has a downside: By always focusing on content, aspects of form may be underemphasized or simply ignored. Students may get to the end of a course, for instance, without ever having looked at certain major grammatical or functional parts of the language. Thus, however much one embraces a philosophy of content, the balance between content and form always has to be considered, because it is in the interests of the students themselves both to have things to say and to have the forms with which to say them. Language teaching materials must also address this balance and take up some position in relation to it. Naturally, there is a whole lot more that can be said about the values inherent in this
textbook or in any other. I have said nothing about lifestyle norms regarding, for example, apartments, cars, and work, that are reflected in the texts and images of the book, or about the image of the student that it discursively constructs, nor about its ideological content; these aspects of ELT materials have been described and analyzed elsewhere (e.g., Canagarajah, 1993). I hope, though, that even in this brief analysis I have given an indication of the rich and conflicting moral messages inscribed in and read from the materials used in ELT classrooms every day across the globe.
Great posts