Page 27 - ELG1704 Apr Issue 446

Fine words

butter no

parsnips

Melanie Butler argues the problem with
text books is the text

HE endless reports of the death best-sellers are looking rather elderly, on reviews on page 36 , all over the world aca-
of the ELT course book have, like average the first edition of the first version of demic managers are pondering what book to
reports of Mark Twain’s death, a current top ten series was published nearly adopt for next year. There are a host of fresh
been greatly exaggerated. General twelve years ago. faced new titles rolling of the presses, will any
T English text books make up 80 It is April. The publishers are polishing of them hit the charts and stay there for the
per cent of all UK ELT book sales and their up their bookstands for conference season, next ten years? We shall see.
sales have remained constant for decades. the Elton Awards long list, see page 17, is Meanwhile, teachers are complaining.
Though, as our graph shows, many of the out and as Wayne Trotman reminds us in his From the twittersphere to the staffroom, from
Facebook to the frontline the moans are go-
ing up. Why aren’t course books well-graded?
Well –written? Well-designed? Why aren’t
they full of comprehensible authentic input?
Why are they all so boring?
One answer put forward by the an-
ti-coursebook Cosa Nostra is the myth of
the dreaded PARSNIP . The seven subjects
supposedly secretly banned by the major pub-
lishing houses : Politics, Alcohol, Religion,
Sex, Narcotics, Isms and Pork. After all,
says one teachers’ blog, ‘these are the things
we talk about’.
Oh really? When was the last time you
sat down with your friends and talked about
pork? Or discussed the political situation in
any county but your own, the one you cur-
rently live in, or America? For that matter
when was the last time you discussed Hin-
duism down the pub? How much do you ac-
tually know about the hadiths of Islam? And
Coursebooks represent top ten series (pictured five houses, with Nation- as for isms, apart from the ones appertaining
80 per cent of sales in the above) having been going al Geographic Learning
UK, according to BEBC, for eleven years on aver- pulling ahead of Macmillan to aforementioned politics and religion, how
the UK’s biggest specialist age. All the chart busters to become the UK’s fourth many of them do you imagine are actually
distributor, and the current were published by the big biggest ELT list.

28 April 2017

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