COURSEBOOK EVALUATION

American Shine for Teens – Macmillan

Coursbook Evaluation

Surfing the net, I found that there is a big amount of ESL books that are described as the best tool ever. Choosing a book could become a hard task if all of them are “good”. As Penny Ur suggested (A course in Language Teaching), is very useful to use a chart where we can present different qualities of a book and then, evaluate.

This chart, taken from Ur, consists of three columns: At the left-hand side it’s presented the importance that I give to that specific quality , in the middle, the quality is named, and at the right-hand side, is the evaluation of the coursebook. Today I’m evaluating “American Shine for Teens 2” by Judy Garton-Sprenger and Philip Prowse for Macmillan.

At the Importance column you`ll find ticks and crosses.  Two ticks – Very important, One tick – Fairly important, Question mark – Not Sure, One cross- Not important, Two crosses – Totally unimportant.

When, in the chart, it is said that a quality is not important, means that you would buy the book, even if that quality didn’t exist.  

 

As you can see, the most important qualities in a book, for me, are:

• Objective in the introduction and implemented in the material
• Interesting topics and tasks
• Content sequenced by difficulty
• Plenty of authentic language
• Good explanation and practice of pronunciation and grammar
• Fluency practice in all four skills
• Audio CDs
• Readily available locally

I’d like to explain why in the left-hand side  are two crosses:

The encouragement of learners to become independent is something more personal that I really prefer to do by my own. I think this specific task is based on the personality and context of each student as individual. And Periodic reviews and test sections are very useful, but If I have a good book in my hands that doesn’t contain that section, it would be fine. I’m sure I can do it without that section. Anyway, it is the teacher`s duty to reinforce what is needed and create the tests. If you read my last entry, you know that I consider coursbooks excellent tools. But we should create our syllabus considering specific contexts and specific needs of our students. And books will never fill every need. That’s why we have to do more than just follow a book. We are able to modify and, of course, to create activities by our own. Sometimes we are going to add contents that are not in the coursebook, or just put a different emphasis. That’s why I think teachers should create their own tests and make up their own reviews; a review is a perfect ocassion to reinforce, according to YOUR students needs.

“American Shine for Teens”, as you can see, is a book that contains everything I consider important.

The objectives of every lesson, are named at the beggining and developed in different activities. It contains interesting topics such as how do astronauts live in the space, dancing, watching TV, ghosts, and, of course, traveling.

What I really like about this book is that there are practical activities for the four skills. It put special attention on pronunciation and entonation. Each two pages you will find pronunciation activities, even phonetic symbols, which include vowels and diphthongs.

What is sad is that this coursebook is not available locally. As it belongs to Macmillan, it was available at Librería Inglesa a few years ago, but right now, they have a different newer version called “American Inspiration for teens”. But it’s not impossible to get it. Mackmillan official webpage http://www.macmillanenglish.com/ offers to deliver it in Europe and that means that it is available. I’m sure there is a possibility to ask for it in advance in Librería Inglesa. Anyway, if you are interested, I saw second-hand books in Mercado Libre, and this one is available.