What ELT books influenced you most as a teacher?
ELT News Japan, 2005
The books that influenced you as a teacher betray your age, because surely some of the most influential ones must come early on. I’ve restricted it to ELT books (textbooks, applied linguistics, teacher training, grammar, dictionaries etc). So here are my five choices.
1) Julian Dakin ‘The Language Laboratory & Language Learning’ (Longman 1973) Out-of-print.
I just started looking through my bookshelves to get the information, and this has now attained legendary status, because I haven’t even got a copy. (Make note: NEVER lend books … either give them away or offer to buy copies for people, but loaning is the same as disposing of). So its contents grow in my mind like the songs on an album you remember from your youth, but have never been able to find a copy of.
First of all, it hasn’t got much to do with language laboratories. Labs were universally popular at the time of publication and he does look at the techniques for various types of oral exercise. What fascinated me most was the invented language he uses as examples of exercise types, Novish. The reader has to work out the rules of Novish from the direct method exercises and every rule is based on a real rule in one language or another. You can try out an exercise in Novish by following this link:
http://www.humsam.hik.se/distans/IMAGES/novish1.swf
What the book did most was make me think about English grammar from the learner’s point of view. However, I can’t say I’ve looked at it regularly because I hadn’t noticed its loss!
2) Robert O’Neill, English in Situations (Oxford University Press, 1968)
Out-of-print
My agenda becomes apparent. I believe that textbooks have had vastly more influence on what happens in the classroom than applied linguistics books, because they are the filter through which teachers get the new ideas. Headway has had more influence on what happens on a daily basis than Krashen. O’Neill’s English in Situations lasted around 35 years, but seems to be out of print now. It had no illustrations. It was in three sections and presented problem areas of grammar in neat contrastive pairs at different levels. It was an ideal stand-by because whenever a question came up in class you could find a short, clever contextualization with a careful set of questions that led students to the contrast. English in Situations set a whole approach and its strong influences can be seen in the selection and ordering of structures in a wide range of current intermediate textbooks.
On the negative side, it tended to avoid those areas of grammar which did not contrast neatly, and that’s something which has continued. It emphasized the teachable over everything else. Teachability is a criterion for selection that you can get away with at the middle levels, but which leaves dangerous gaps lower down, and is irrelevant higher up. For example, I maintain that most coursebooks devote far more space to comparatives than they’re worth communicatively, because they’re easy to teach and codify and students give a satisfying “Ah!” after explanations.
3) L.G. Alexander, First Things First, Teacher’s Book (Longman, 1967)
It was already looking old when I started teaching, and at first I hated this book. But the teacher’s book introduction and interleaved notes were highly influential. It wasn’t the first interleaved teacher’s book (I think that was Realistic English, OUP, which was also spiral bound, which First Things First wasn’t.) The notes and summaries were very basic and were unashamedly dull, but for a novice teacher they provided a get up and do it possibility. The introduction was a compact mini training course. The student book was never a favourite (awful illustration, wooden recordings), but the very short illustrated dialogues put the onus on the teacher and the teacher’s book to provide an active lesson using the student book as a springboard. You didn’t just plow through a range of activities on the page, YOU the teacher provided them from the teacher’s book, which the students hadn’t seen, so it kept the lesson lively and active. You never had to say ‘Turn to Module 4, Section A, Listening, Exercise 4, Part 2.’ either. As for the student book, Alexander had analyzed structural progression for beginners, with only one new structural item per lesson, more thoroughly than anyone else. He was not a great contextualizer but he was a superb analyst. Later, Louis Alexander worked with W. Stannard-Allen and R.A. Close and Robert O’Neill to produce English Grammatical Structure (Longman, 1975), a reference book which broke the language into six stages, with thirty logical steps within each stage, complete with a lexicon for each stage. It was a course designer’s dream and it made no attempt at frequency or usefulness, just a bare bones structural index. The course designer had to rework it in terms of function, vocabulary and usefulness, but at least one major task had been done.
4) Michael Lewis, The English Verb (LTP, 1986)
Michael Lewis is best known for The Lexical Approach (LTP, 1993), but this earlier volume is equally essential, if less well-known. Michael Lewis rethinks the structure and meaning of the verb system, and comes up with novel and fascinating practical ‘rules’. For example, he defines the use of some and any more accurately than any of the grammar books I have on my shelves. He can write too, which makes a change.
5) Jennifer Jenkins, The Phonology of English as an International Language (Oxford University Press, 2000)
If The Lexical Approach was the most read and quoted book of the 1990s, I’d like to think that Jennifer Jenkins will be the most influential of the 2000s, in spite of a less than catchy title, and that mutual intelligibility will follow on from collocation as the buzz word. This is one you have to read. I’ve had unease about nit-picking pronunciation points based on native speaker examples for years and I found myself nodding in agreement again and again. Negative point – far too many initials – IL, ILT, NS, NNS, MDH, DL1, SABE which could have been replaced with words by doing a search and change and adding ten pages or so.
Peter Viney's Blog 
Thanks very much for this interesting post, Peter. I’ve just referenced it in a discussion over at http://kalinago.blogspot.com/2010/11/which-came-first-time-or-tenses.html
where I quoted a chunk and trust you won’t mind.
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I forgot to say, I loved that description of “some” and “any” in Michael Lewis’s book too!
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I just came across this because Vicki left a link on a similar post on my blog:
http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/tefl/publishing/publications-that-changed-tefl
I’d agree with the textbooks having more impact point, but I wonder what Headway itself actually changed. It was around when I first started teaching, so I wonder how it was different to the books that went before and how it changed the ones that went after. Ditto with your own Grapevine, which I put in a section for ones I was considering putting in the list but didn’t know enough about to be sure
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Phew, Alex! I meant to do a three line reply but got carried away.
Headway? I said it had more influence on what happens in the classroom than Krashen. I didn’t say that was a good thing! There are a number of reasons. First, every publisher has spent the last twenty-five years trying to clone it, which means you can assemble a large pile of books that look superficially like Headway. Its approach is now dominant. So is its syllabus progression, which at the bottom two levels at least, is dubious to dedicated beginner specialists.
I’m very reluctant to criticize rival textbooks, because only other coursebook writers appreciate the amount of careful work that goes into them. And Headway was obviously a principled textbook series written from the point of view of classroom experience.
OK, but for me, Headway took ELT a step or three backwards. It played to the established prejudices of “what a course book looks like” to those who’d come from French and German teaching into ELT, and it swamped students with dense texts, vastly over-lengthy listenings, and vocabulary explanation. One teacher I used to work with told me she loved Headway passionately because “you never run out of vocabulary to explain.” Explaining lots of vocabulary is teacher-centred and dull, to my mind. It’s what authors like O’Neill and Alexander got ELT away from in the late 60s and early 70s. Headway took it back very much to “pre-Alexander and O’Neill” days.
I like to think Bernie Hartley and I had carried on their torch into the 80s, with minimal texts, large proportions of mainly didactic illustration on the page, and the direction and methodology hidden away in the teachers book. This meant the path of the lesson was not pre-ordained. It wasn’t “Turn to page 37, unit five, Section A, exercise 4, sub-section c, point iii, pair work”. The teacher could adapt and extemporise. Even if the teacher stuck to the TB notes faithfully, to the class, the teacher was apparently making the decisions NOT the text book. When I was talking about “Grapevine” I called this “Teacher Independence.” Streamline did this without balancing skills, but Grapevine balanced the skills and was a fuller and rounder course.
The vocabulary in Headway (and most of its clones) is also not considered, in that it derives from the semi-authentic topics, meaning that a large proportion is outside what (say) a graded reader at the level would expect students to know. Thinner text books which motivated and left more to the teacher have always been my preference. I also find the choice of topics predictable, a fact emphasized because so many others have imitated it rather than originated. If you wish to avoid blandness and banality, you have to use humour, and you have to use fiction. You also have to be able to write dialogue that sound realistic, even in a way-out situation.
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[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Luke Meddings, Adam Simpson and Sandra Goronas, vickihollett. vickihollett said: Peter Viney talks to Alex Case about influential course books. http://bit.ly/eD71HO […]
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For me it was “In at the Deep End.” And it’s not because Vicki has commented here — she knows how much I love it!
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I was in the bar with some colleagues at International House in its then Piccadilly location, one evening in 1986, when John Soars came in and proudly showed us the first, hot-off-the-press copy of Headway Intermediate. Little did we know… etc etc. More to the point, not only did that series set an industry standard (as Peter points out), but it effectively delivered a death blow to the functional-notional syllabuses that underpinned the communicative approach (powered by Wilkins, van Ek etc) in the mid 1970s. I had discovered the liberating effect of the communicative approach using the Strategies series (which I have celebrated on my own blog), and in particular the realisation that – if your syllabus is framed in terms of communicative purposes – you HAVE to include communication in your repertoire of classroom activities. Not only do you have to include it but (if you really buy into the principle that communicative competence is achieved through communication), you have to foreground it. By re-establishing grammar as the organising principle of coursebook design, Headway (and its imitators) effectively dealt a death blow to the communicative approach, from which it never recovered. That’s why I would vote Headway as the MOST influential publication of the last 50 years, even though its influence was (in my opinion) largely malign.
(I also endorse Peter’s choice of Dakin, Lewis and O’Neill’s English in Situations – of which I am the proud owner of a copy, rescued from the recycling bin at some school I once taught at).
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We had a trial set of the original (white) Strategies just prior to publication in 1975 (?). Karen grabbed it first, and I remember the class she trialled it with (I. 16), French, Mexican, Venezuelan and Kuwaiti mainly. I even remember the room they were in at Anglo-Continental, 31.04. They were an unusual class because we had a sudden bulge in Intermediate arrivals one month. Anglo had three departments based on levels, and I. 16 was an Intermediate class, but administered from the Elementary Dept (of which I was Head) and taught by our teachers. Therefore we (unusually) had a totally free hand on materials and could try something new. It was Strategies.
Karen was incredibly excited about it, saying “You have to try this” and we all did and followed it through with them and the next classes. It was indeed a new focus on communication, but I’d say it was still underlyingly structural much of the time … Talking About the Recent Past is only a shade different than “The Present Perfect.” But it was a major shift in emphasis, and that communicated to teachers and students.
Headway trumpeted “Back to Grammar” in much the way that British stationers sell books called “The Good Old Fashioned Multiplication Tables” or “The Good Old Fashioned Spelling Book.” Both equate “old-fashioned” and “good” as if inextricably linked. But my issue with Headway isn’t a structural basis to the syllabus, but that it was back to analysing long contexts, via listening or reading. There was little on communication, as Scott points out, and in the early editions, virtually no dialogue (it was added later) or interaction. I think you can be communicative with an underlying grammar syllabus (which Strategies had), but it’s the activities and intent that count more than the way you cut the syllabus up.
If anyone has my copy of Dakin, I’d love it back!
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Peter, out of curiosity I checked on Amazon and found 8 used copies of Dakin’s ‘The Language Laboratory and Language Learning’, and bought one (for £0.01 + postage!) so now there are 7. One of them may well be yours!
My own personal tribute to the Strategies series, and ‘white’ Strategies in particular, can be found here:
http://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2010/03/07/s-is-for-strategies/
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My two cents on what Headway has brought to ELT – for better and for worse.
1. The use of metalanguage. I could be wrong, but wasn’t the very first unit of Headway Intermediate called “The Simple Present”?
2. Grammar discovery questions as the standard model of language analysis. While the intellectual engagement they can potentially generate has a lot to be said in its favor, a lot of these “inductive” questions perhaps engage learners in too much grammar analysis far too soon.
3. The return of gap-fill (and gap-fill type activities) as something to be done in class rather than at home (for consolidation only). In the Strategies series, for example, you’d be hard pressed to find a single “fill in the blanks with…” on any of the pages. So, in that sense, perhaps there was slightly more “text creation” than “text manipulation” work in ELT way back then. (Can’t remember who coined these terms).
4. The return of books that were meant to be followed fairly linearly, with pages containing lots and lots of text.
5. A decidedly marginal role to functional language – in one particular edition, the formulaic expressions appeared at the end of each unit in a section called “post script”.
However,
6. If I’m not mistaken, Headway was the first book to tackle the receptive skills systematically, with pre/while/post activities dealing with different microskills. If I remember correctly, they even used words such as “skimming” on the scope and sequence page. Even though the texts and listening were a bit on the long side, their systematic approach to skills development deserves a lot of credit, I think.
Interestingly enough, as a rule, it’s really the American textbooks (not the adapted versions) that have been able to stray from the Headway model a bit. It’s in the American titles that perhaps you tend to find less gap-fill, more dialogs, more A-B exchanges, more functional language and less crammed pages. The Spectrum series, for example, had a remarkably long life span in Brazil – it was still selling like hotcakes well into the late 90s.
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Was it really 1986 for Headway Intermediate? That means it was a good 10 years before the New Edition came out. Those were the days…
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Hi Peter, I’m glad I came across your blog while I was browsing auction websites for out-of-print ELT textbooks. Eventually I came across your series of articles about the Streamline series. Wow! When I started teaching English as a foreign language here in Brazil, I used the Streamline series for so many years and I’d like so much to revisit it but I can’t find any copies here in Brazil. I wish there was a website featuring a catalogue of out-of-print ELT textbooks. I do agree that the Streamline series allowed teachers to use their creativity to (sort of) fill the gaps; it was less prescriptive than other textbooks we used. How can I ever forget ‘Willy the Kid arrived in Dodge City one evening?” I would cut out the pictures and have my students put them in the right order to tell the story. That lesson was surely a hit among my students. I clearly remember planning my lessons for the ‘Everyday Conversations’ section. There were so many different ways of delivering them. We also used the “A weekend Away” video lessons. I was still learning to teach and back in the late 1980s/early 1990s, online resources would be almost unimaginable even in my wildest dreams — let alone contacting a book author overseas. So the video played a very important role as it provided students with real life English in a way they could understand. I confess I learned quite a lot of English expressions from those lessons as well. I’d really like to be able to get print or electronic copies of these out-of-print textbooks. I may sound a bit nostalgic but I’d like to leaf through books such as Strategies, Streamline, and Lifestyles because I’ve been wanting to write an article about what it was like to teach back in the late 1980s and 1990s in Brazil.
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The University of Warwick is assembling an ELT archive with textbooks. It is important to record how it was done, and text books are the interface with students.
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