The past few weeks have seen us busy deciding on the textbooks to be used in the various courses we offer through the englishpool school network.
As the academic year here in Japan runs from April to March we here at englishpool use that as the basis for our school year.
Although we all thought we had plenty of time to decide textbooks I still found myself discussing the various pros and cons of various textbooks with the school owners right up until the deadline.
Children's text books for use in our Kids Stages and Elementary Stage classes will be from
Oxford's Magic Time and English Time series. We used this series in 2004/5 and everybody seemed very happy with them so it only made sense to bring them back for this year.
Junior High classes will use the Connect books from
Cambridge University Press. I used this series last year with a few students and it captured their attention whilst covering the basics.
Adults. This is the one that gave us the most problems. I had a least two sleepless nights wondering if I'd got this one right, and even made a quick dash to
Nellie's Bookstore in Asakusabashi , with my 3 year old daughter in tow, to beg for advice from the staff there. So after much deliberation I plumbed for American Headway from
Oxford University Press.
Now those that know anything about textbooks will be saying why all the deliberation over the Headway series? Well, I've had a habit of choosing textbooks that concentrate on generating conversation and have avoided the standard textbooks like the plague (I learnt to teach English as a Foreign Language using Side-by-side!)But a lot of our teachers have said that the students would like to be able to hold conversations but don't have the basic English skills in place to be able to do so.
So Headway answers this problem by covering the basics in depth, and if a teacher wants to engage their students in conversations they are free to do so.
Afterall conversations are a natural thing and not something you can direct from textbook.
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