Textbook Evaluation

Part II: Chapter Evaluation

In order to better show how this textbook functions and evaluate its assets, I will examine a chapter of the book in detail, pointing out the types of activities used and the skills they emphasize, the level of engagement it entails, the usefulness for the students and the teacher, and the overall effectiveness of the chapter. Obviously, one chapter alone does not best represent the entirety of content this book provides, but it will give us an idea of how it is structured and what it provides for the students. I have chosen to evaluate and analyze Chapter 1 of Pathways, titled “Healthy Lives.” It follows a health science academic track. Some of the main academic skills it plans on developing through the course of the chapter are listening for main ideas, practicing conversation and presentation, critical reading, frequency expressions, and the final -s sound. Each of the chapters has a critical thinking focus, and this one aims at interpreting visuals.

Activity Analysis

The first three activities are interrelated. Part A shows the students a t-chart comparing the health habits of the people from Sardinia, Italy and Okinawa, Japan. The words and phrases in blue are brought up throughout the chapter and are therefore exercised in two different forms of activity immediately following. The first is an audio exercise in which the students are supposed to listen for those words in context and make note of the words they hear. After that, they are given 10 different definitions and abbreviations for the parts of speech for each, and the students are supposed to use exercise A as a word bank to match the words to their definitions. Exercise D also gives different sentences in which the student is supposed to use the phrases/words from exercises A-C but in a form that fits within the context of the sentence given. For example:

3. My grandmother is 90 and very healthy. I think she ____________ to live to 100.

The correct answer to number three is the first phrase in the word bank (“are as likely”) reworked to fit into the sentence (“is likely”). This is obviously the most difficult of the exercises given thus far because the students must take the words out of their original context and manipulate them to be grammatically correct under different circumstances. This series of activities shows a steady progression towards higher difficulty, and the repetition of the words through reading, listening, and writing after acquiring them allows them to apply them throughout the rest of the chapter as well. As students progress through these types of activities, further along is some sort of set of discussion questions that are designed to be worked through as a group. The questions included not only rely on the vocabulary learned but conversational abilities and verbal sentence forming. This activity is less structured as the students aren’t directly working from the book, differing from the previous set of structured exercises. Overall, this chapter has a steady progression from lower to higher levels of difficulty, building upon what the students learn in order to be able to succeed in later exercises, and uses a mix of structured and unstructured exercises to aid in thorough language learning prior to language application.

Overall Effectiveness

While the movement from easier to more difficult exercises is key to language acquisition, a quick progression does not always leave enough time to sit with the vocabulary. As this is the first chapter in the book, students are given phrasal verbs and other phrases that need to be conjugated correctly under different tenses and for different grammatical persons with which they may not all be familiar. The textbook assumes that the students are capable of this in order to apply the vocabulary from section A to section D but includes nothing reminding the student of these rules so they can effectively complete D and speak in groups as in exercise E. The teacher can amend this by making an assignment aside from the textbook or analyzing the students’ abilities in advance of beginning chapter 1. This seems to be a pattern throughout, which is evident in many textbooks (especially in language learning) and usually can be mended by teacher instruction or separate content learning.

The progression from acquisition to application starts over at the beginning of each section of the chapter, so once the students have reached the peak of difficulty in the Vocabulary section they can drop back down to a lower level of difficulty in the following Listening section. This will help students get into a rhythm with the content and hopefully prevents them from feeling burnt out as they progress through the chapter. Overall, this chapter is very effective in how it presents new information and expects the students to retain it, using listening activities, videos, pictures, reading, and discourse in order to stretch the student’s abilities and ultimately help them grow as English learners.