Text Book or Course Book? Part One: Authentic style texts

We're all busy looking at inspection copies and sample units of textbooks. I prefer "textbook" over "coursebook" probably because I don't follow them as a "course", but rather as a source of texts. So what sort of things might I do with some texts?

The examples in this series of posts are from the 2009 OUP GCSE textbook which I still use and will continue to use selectively.

The OUP textbook I co-authored for the 2009 GCSE.

Maybe you want a text to be used for interest, information and learning about the Spanish-speaking world.

From the 2009 OUP Textbook

Here's an example telling pupils all about a typical wedding in Mexico. I had a class 2 years ago who didn't believe a word of it, but luckily we found a video of someone's wedding on YouTube that confirmed all the goings-on. Even the money in the shoe and the death-march-clothes business.

There is a school of thought that it is through this sort of text where you are genuinely reading to find out new things, that language-learning actually happens. I find this something of a romantic notion. I don't think it is true either that it is a recipe for automatic learning, or that learning cannot happen through texts more focused on practising language than on the content.

In fact there is an opposing theory, that such texts are not useful for language-learning. Because pupils are distracted by the interesting content. Because pupils are overloaded so we concentrate on the exciting cultural content and skip reading carefully. Because pupils are guessing most of the meaning from a few cognates and what makes sense. Because it is not written to carefully model language. So there is an impression of learning but it's all an illusion.

Of course, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It is important for pupils to be able to read interesting content in the language they are learning. But it has no magical powers. At the same time, it is important that they have a constant feedback loop between the meaning of the overall text and the meaning of each part of each sentence. Sometimes knowing words and grammar leads to understanding of meaning. Sometimes grasping what is being explained means you can focus on detail of grammar or vocabulary.

So what would I do with this text?

First of all, vocabulary: The topic vocabulary will be in the word list we work on in class and for homework. And it will feature in other texts and speaking/writing activities on this topic so pupils are meeting it repeatedly. Things like wedding/bride/presents. Of course for the new GCSE we will want to trust that the new textbooks have somehow constructed their texts from the words on the vocabulary list.

Then there's vocabulary from other topics being revisited: shoe/lake/food/tables. Again, we want to be sure that the new GCSE text books do this deliberately in order to make sure all the words are constantly recycled and met in new contexts.

And high frequency non topic vocabulary: all/after/then/while/the most. Which it turns out we have always had in texts. Because it is by definition high frequency language!

So I can ask pupils to locate this vocabulary. Either by asking them to find words in each of these categories (celebrations topic words, other topic words, non topic words). Or by listing words in English for them to locate in the Spanish text.

I also use this same technique for words which they don't already know. So if I give them in English: standing / took off / carried / dead person, then they can find them in the text. These words are not easy cognates that will jump out at them. They will have to read the sentences carefully, and identify unknown words. Then they have to interrogate the meaning of all the words in the sentence and any clues contained in the grammatical form of the word, to decide if they have found the word they are looking for. And if memory is the residue of thought, then having to think about a word will also assist in learning it.

Grammar. I will want pupils to find and categorise the verbs, according to person (I, he/she, we and they), and tense (what happened and what was happening).

These tasks are a preliminary to reading the text closely. But so far, rather than reading the text word-by-word and getting stuck, we have asked pupils to read through the text multiple times paying attention to specific words and grammar. In fact, while they do this, most pupils are doing more than jabbing at individual words like a heron, and are putting together meaning around the words. But we will want to go beyond this, to a close understanding of exactly what it says.

Will I do comprehension questions? Maybe not. Comprehension questions may turn out to allow answers based on a gist reading rather than the detail of the words. If you want, you can use the questions themselves to spoon-feed much of the text to the pupils as in this post. In a course book, this is a useful way of making the text accessible. But in a class with a teacher, you can get the pupils to work much harder in engaging with the language of the text.

But I might do AQA style comprehension questions. I've written about this in previous posts to show how what you think is a correct answer does not score marks in the exam board markscheme. So I give pupils the question and an answer that doesn't quite get the mark. For example: What did she go to? And the "wrong" answer: A wedding in Mexico. Pupils have to read carefully and give the complete answer: A friend's cousin's wedding in a town in Mexico.

This kind of answer that AQA seem to want, is closer to a word-by-word translation than a comprehension question. And I may well ask the class to translate the text. Often this would be another lesson. So they have remembered much of the meaning, and vocabulary, but need to look closely at the text for exact grammatical detail.

I like to come back to texts in future lessons. So again, they might meet the same text a couple of weeks later, but this time as a listening with me reading the text aloud. I would be careful to set questions that require careful listening to the language, not based on general memory of the gist of the content. Or in another lesson we could try to reconstruct the text in Spanish, not aiming for a translation, but to write in our own Spanish an account of what happens in a Mexican wedding.

This use of texts as framework for speaking and writing will be picked up on in a future post in this series, looking at a different aspect of texts: Modelling the language we want pupils to be producing.

The new textbooks are treading an interesting line. Their texts claim to be full of interesting cultural learning, at the same time as recycling vocabulary in different contexts, carefully sequencing grammar, and developing the skills of using language that pupils will need in the exam. How much of this is built into the books as a course? And how much of it is down to how the teacher uses the texts?

Part Two - Text Book? Course Book? Texts as model answers is now available for you to read.