Reading reflection Week 9: How my teaching desire grows stronger...

In this week's reading, I found the chapter on textbook evaluation and implementation greatly practical and useful. After reading the chapters i am able to identify where i will be at in my future teaching concerning the choice of textbooks. Specifically, in my future teaching context in Vietnam, the Ministry of Education and Training publishes their own version of national textbooks and i will have to stick to their designs as long as i am still teaching at Mid/High school. I know this means i will not have much freedom regarding what to teach, but at the same time it gives novice teachers like me crucial initial guidelines as to how i am to plan and teach a lesson of my own. Also, as stated in the book, a nationalized textbook does not close off all of teachers' own choices. The door to creative and active teaching is still wide open provided that language teachers know how to maximize their "power".

Also, the part about "The fit between Students and Texts", in which one of the criteria under investigation is how Exercises/Tasks provided in the textbook relate to students' interests, did very much remind me of the different textbooks that i had when learning foreign languages. These examples again are about my French versus English learning experience, and this time it is about the textbooks being used. For my English classes, all of the content of the textbooks used in all grades focus on very general everyday and social issues such as environment, festivals, family, school life, etc., which are of course all useful for us students with respect to vocabulary and grammar acquisition. However, when it comes to my French textbook (which was the authentic ones written by native French speakers), since the title of the textbook is "ADO" - the abbreviation for "adolescent" in French, the story is totally different: most of the book is amazingly about popular teenage issues and problems such as dressing styles, hairstyles, boyfriend/girlfriend affairs, generation gap/conflicts and so on. It is therefore not very difficult for you to imagine how much we loved the fantastic French textbook compared with its practical yet not-very-fanciful English counterpart. As a result, even though French is not our main foreign language, my friends and I really enjoyed the class and we even tried to look up the new words before class to understand the teenage stories that were featured in the textbook, which really amazed my French teacher. This greatly brings it home to me how a student-oriented textbook version can help make teaching and learning more interesting and appealing to teachers and students alike.

Finally, to tell you the truth, the more I read about lesson planning and textbook evaluation in this week's reading, the more my desire for teaching grows stronger and the more i want to apply those guidelines and evaluation techniques that are put forward in the book into my future teaching. I can feel very clearly here how inspiring this reading time is to me as a reader and a future language teacher.