Is LanguageTrack really alone in predicting the demise of the hard-copy classroom language textbook?
We at LanguageTrack foresee the imminent end of that sad and moth-eaten relic of a bygone age – the classroom language textbook. Those endlessly recycled smelly excuses for books, which sit in stacks on the department shelves and are handed out again in September, pages missing, to pupils with genuine anticipation and eagerness. Can there be anything more designed to dampen enthusiasm than those tired, sad objects?

The bottom line is this: Language-learning does not need a scruffy book. In fact a scruffy book is counter-productive because it misleads the learner into thinking it will teach him/her to speak. It won’t. Words and pictures on pages don’t speak, they just provide information and a stimulus for the teacher to do the speaking. But let’s face it, hand on heart, in a classroom of 30, how many teachers can swear they had a captive audience when they pronounced those new words over and over again? “Right, Jimmy, you pronounce it after me? Listen carefully and repeat it. OK now everybody, repeat after me!” That method is, to say the least, laboured and time-consuming. There is another way: the e-language textbook.

Unlike the dubious and quickly-outdated graphics and lexical explanations of a paper textbook, the e-textbook, up on screen in front of the learner, can provide, day after day, lesson after lesson, a fresh new image which gives you its sound the minute you click the mouse over it. Unlike Maths, or History or Geography, the essence of language learning is communication and if you’re looking down into a textbook, you’re most probably not communicating but doing the opposite, hiding.

So what’s stopping schools from handing out to pupils in September a brand new CD for their very own, instead of that torn, dilapidated textbook?

Cost? OK, the school’s invested £300 in volume 2 of ‘Francais Interactif’ (not to mention volumes 1 & 3), and wants to, has to, realise a return on its investment. We say, scrap those hard copies, they’re no good, bite the bullet and pay £150 for a networked version of a multimedia language program (with workbook perhaps) and take up the company’s offer of a brand new CD in the hands of every pupil at a unit cost of £9.99. Just bill the pupils a one-off charge of £9.99 per year. Who’s going to mind that?

Technology? It’s arrived. Most classrooms are now fitted with a white board of some sort and a projector connected to a central classroom laptop. That’s all you need for classroom display, and at the end of the lesson, set prep from the same program. Every pupil’s got his own CD, remember?

Motivation? The question has to be asked: Is it really the spoken language that pupils are being required to learn in that slot on the timetable that sends them to the language room? Or is it something else, something far less exciting and less demanding? The pupils think it is (that’s why they get so frustrated) and the parents certainly assume it is, but do the teachers and, worse, do the exam boards? We believe the jury’s out, but to judge by the average English teenager’s lamentable linguistic capitulation when abroad on holiday “Well, they all speak English anyway!” we have the nasty feeling that somewhere within all those exam boards’ syllabuses and their ‘inventive’ new formats, the real issues are being missed again and again. You don’t learn to speak a language unless you hear, hear again, mimic, fill your head for forty minutes with the sounds of the language. And what better way is there to do that, in the classroom context, than to work together or individually from an interactive language program?

So once again: Is it only us who foresees the replacement of the 4Ts with a classroom e-textbook?

We’d be very pleased to hear from any teachers wishing to either agree with us or take issue with us. We don’t presume to think our views are set in stone but we do feel it’s time to put them on record and time for a debate. Please click here if you would like to contact us.