The Changing EFL Teacher-Textbook Relationship in Ukraine, 1917 – 2010: a Non-Native English-Speaking Teacher’S Perspective

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2019-01-25 The Changing EFL Teacher-Textbook Relationship in Ukraine, 1917 – 2010: A Non-Native English-Speaking Teacher’s Perspective. An Autoethnography

Chebotaryov, Oleksandr

Chebotaryov, O. (2019). The Changing EFL Teacher-Textbook Relationship in Ukraine, 1917 – 2010: A Non-Native English-Speaking Teacher’s Perspective. An Autoethnography (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/109860 master thesis

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The Changing EFL Teacher-Textbook Relationship in Ukraine, 1917 – 2010:

A Non-Native English-Speaking Teacher’s Perspective

An Autoethnography

Oleksandr Chebotaryov

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

CALGARY, ALBERTA

JANUARY, 2019

Abstract

The goal of this autoethnographic study is to understand the relationship between a non-native

English-speaking teacher of English as a foreign language and their textbooks at different stages of their professional development, in different socio-cultural and political – Soviet and post-

Soviet – contexts with the growing tendency of opposing or rejecting textbooks as educational tools. The study focuses on the gap in the literature, which lacks the account of textbooks in action. It is a first-person narrative of the use of English language textbooks, which is set in a school in Ukraine. The study also provides the retrospective on the development of local English textbooks published and used in the Soviet Union and later in independent Ukraine outlining differences and similarities between local and global trends in textbook use.

Acknowledgements

It is my pleasure to thank the people who helped make this thesis possible.

First, I express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Veronica Bohac Clarke, who encouraged me to take the road to the academy and gave invaluable advice when I needed it.

I would like to thank Dr. Rahat Zaidi, my supervisor, who would always challenge me to be self-reliant in the pursuit of my degree and to look ahead to future endeavors.

My sincere utmost gratitude is due to Dr. Ian Winchester, my co-supervisor, whose humanistic approach, inspirational guidance and almost magical powers made me motivated, focused and organized. No words can express how grateful I am.

I would like to thank my committee members Dr. Paul James Stortz and Dr. Catherine

Chua for their critical insight and fruitful discussions.

My thanks also go to my course instructors Dr. Hetty Roessingh, Dr. Yan Guo, Dr. Greg

Lowan-Trudeau, Dr. Marlon Simmons, with special thanks to Dr. Sylvie Roy for giving me the sense of direction in research, and Dr. Mairi McDermott for introducing me to the realms of autoethnography.

My deepest love and thoughts are with my family, my mother, my wife and children, my sister, and my extended family. You have always been with me during all these years, and I give you my love whether I am near or far.

I would like to express my warmest gratitude to my colleagues, friends and students, both in Canada and Ukraine, who followed my academic endeavor and gave me support and encouragement.

iii

Dedication

For those who write across the lines

Table of Contents

Abstract………………………………………………………………………………….ii

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………...iii

Dedication ……………………………………………………………………………….iv

Table of Contents …………………………………………………………………….….v

List of Illustrations …………………………………………………………………..…vi

Introduction ……………………………………………………………………...………1

Chapter 1 – Making a Proposal…………………………………………………………5

Chapter 2 – Books about Books: Literature Review………………………..………..22

Chapter 3 – In Search of Methodology………………………………………………..35

Chapter 4 – Mind If I Find?...... 55

Chapter 5 – Analyzing That……………………………..…………………………...177

References ………………………………………………………………………….…185

List of Illustrations

Figure 1. Restored pictures (Chebotaryov, 1995, p. 111) ……………..……………… 142

Figure 2. Manuscript pages (Krivchikova & Chebotaryov, 1995), author’s archive … 146

Figure 3. Manuscript pages (Krivchikova & Chebotaryov, 1995), author’s archive .... 148

Figure 4. Self-made prompts to scaffold students’ speaking…………………………. 169

Introduction

“Many leading scientists do not consider that science

can give absolutely reliable knowledge”.

(Longman Dictionary of contemporary English, 2009, p. 1559)

One of the typical features of an educator’s work is the permanent feeling of dissatisfaction. That feeling can grow or fade, but it never goes away completely. The root of that dissatisfaction lies in the desire of a normal person to do things well, and if possible, better.

As things do not always go well in the classroom due to various reasons, people in charge start looking for the guilty party. People in charge belong to different groups both in and out of education: general public, mostly represented by parents and mass media, educational authorities of all levels, educational publishers and their representatives, academia, instructors, teachers, and less often students. As it is extremely rare for the humans to find fault with themselves, they tend to find the roots of our problems in someone or something different from themselves. Sometimes it is reasonable, sometimes not, but as everyone of us has been involved in the educational process, many people think they have expertise in the matter.

Although experts in education are many, the inner circle is made up of students and teachers. They interact much more often than any other participants of the big debate, and the classroom is the place where the main things in education happen. Apart from teachers and students – and the furniture – school classrooms also have books on shelves. Many of them are textbooks, the silent third element of the teaching and learning process (see Allwright, 1981;

Maley, 2011), which in the recent years received more attention and criticism than in previous decades, the element which is often called the main reason for the dissatisfaction.

If we look closer into the case of the textbook, or to be more precise the textbook of

English as a foreign language (EFL), we will find ourselves amidst such polarized statements, opinions and views, that at first it seems almost impossible to navigate through a whole stack of controversy surrounding the subject:

“The assumption is that textbooks, sanitized as they are, are factual and thus noncontroversial” (Longman Dictionary, 2009, DVD-ROM, Examples from the corpus).

“Coursebooks are commodities to be traded, but what they contain is the result of the interplay between, at times, contradictory commercial, pedagogic and ethical interests” (Gray, 2002, p. 157).

“…textbooks are often identified as a major contributor to the general fund of ignorance”

(Tyson & Woodward,1989, p. 14).

“...it is far better to set out the positive advantages of using textbooks...” (O’Neill, 1982, p. 104).

“...not too much can be expected from teaching materials” (Allwright, 1981, p.8).

“Student teachers are taught that good teachers do not follow the textbook but devise their own curriculum and materials” (Hutchinson & Torres, 1994, p. 316).

“Student teachers who experienced a teacher training program that devalued textbooks used textbooks in all of the subject areas during student teaching” (Zahorik, 1991, p. 185).

“A textbook is the teacher’s tool. It is to the teacher what the spade is to the gardener, the chisel and saw and screwdriver to the woodworker, the typewriter to the typist” (West, 1960, p.

75).

“...I have been waging war on materials-driven lessons” (Thornbury, 2000, p. 2).

“If you’ve never used a coursebook, the chances are that you have never been a language teacher” (Freebairn, 2000, p. 3).

“Textbooks are written and published under the direct supervision of the Ministry of

Education. Both teachers and students are obliged to rely on the textbooks for their teaching and learning” (Mustafa & Cullingford, 2008, p.87).

“In both countries teachers used textbooks very frequently, in class and for their lesson preparation, and this set the tone for their teaching” (Pepin, Gueudet & Trouche, 2013, p. 696).

“To combat this trend of over-reliance on the textbook, a strong case has been made for the promotion of teacher-generated materials…” (Rubdy, 2003, p. 39).

“Textbooks define, codify and organize” (Christenbury & Kelly, 1994, p. 76).

“I want coursebooks that are so engaging, inspiring, flexible and effective that I can just teach without much extra work” (Masuhara, 2011, p. 236).

“Despite the impact of new technologies, textbooks will doubtless continue to play an important role in language teaching and provide a useful resource for both teachers and learners”

(Richards, 2001, p. 6).

So, what makes the EFL/ESL textbook – despite the growth of new technologies and despite profound criticism of being outdated, bland, artificial, dull, boring, unrealistic – strive and survive and become, in some classical or exceptional cases, an agent of change (Hutchinson

& Torres, 1994)? The current research is one attempt to address this question.

It is organized as a story of the changing relationship between a working non-native

English-speaking teacher of English from Ukraine and his textbooks from the mid-1980s to the

2010s. However, it happened to go farther beyond those years as far as the end of the 19th century. I believe that such digressions and other interpolations do not hamper the main storyline but add some unexpected strokes to it.

Chapter 1 is about outlining the problem, shaping the purpose of the study and the research questions. It also shows why I choose the word textbook to refer to teaching tools and

4 why I find it significant to explain a teacher’s position on the problem and give it a new facet.

Chapter 2 reviews literature about textbooks in the main areas of textbook research. It shows the interrelation and interpenetration of those research areas, looks into the consumption area of the research and into the debate on pros and cons of using textbooks in EFL classrooms.

It argues that key notions are often intermingled, and new meanings imposed in the course of the debate, and that such imposition and imprecision can bring more uncertainty than clarity in the matter. It also identifies a gap in literature on studying teaching materials in action.

Chapter 3 explains why autoethnography seems to be the only possible method for this study. It shows how our bits of memory become field notes, how we bind them together with each piece adding to a bigger picture, how the story winds around those pieces to give them meanings and interpret them, how personal is related to educational, social and political, how we re-experience our past and give it new meanings.

Chapter 4 comprises the main story of how teacher-textbook relationships changed over time, what stages are typical for a working teacher to his textbooks in his attempts to find the golden mean between the desired and the given. It shows how going back in time helps understand today’s trends in both EFL teaching in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts in Ukraine and the role of textbook in it. Although the study is set mainly in Ukraine, it seems to be far from being exclusively local and may add to understanding similar situations and trends in the global context.

Chapter 5 discusses the findings and analyzes their results offering answers to the research questions and providing insights into future possible studies, which may help to further bridge the existing gaps in studying textbooks and other teaching materials in action.

So, we begin…

Chapter 1

Making a Proposal:

Unpacking a Sentence, or a Tribute to Herman Melville and Others

Call me whatever you want. Some years ago, I took my first steps into the academic part of the educational world. As I was paving my road into the Kingdom of Research, I could not but look back and ask myself one question. And the question was, “What was it, that made me drop everything, step into the waters of the new mode of relationships with the world, and find myself in a totally different state of mind at the age, when the majority of my colleagues take resolute steps towards retirement?” I kept asking myself that question again and again. I also tried to understand what it was that had been stirring my mind, as I strived to take shape out of my experience, that I had during the long history of my teaching practice, or rather during my long life in and around education. When you have similar questions with no clear answers, you feel that something must be wrong.

Enters Csíkszentmihályi1.

“It is not skills we actually have that determine how we feel, but the ones we think we

have.”

Oh, yes! I think I have skill for research or writing, but how do I…?

“Your skills are not quite as high as they should be, but you can move into flow fairly

easily by just developing a little more skill.”

I understand about the skills, but… will my experience be of any use?

“Go with the Flow.”

That’s what I’m doing!

Csíkszentmihály goes out.

1 For the sources in this chapter, see “Other books used in this paper” in Reference section.

Do not I know what other people know?

You get through high school into college, then if you really want it, you pursue your master’s degree and after that PhD, and you write articles and books on how to teach children or adults. In between, you may teach at a school, but not for too long, as there are other important things to do: conferences, seminars, workshops, presentations, more conferences… When you join it at a reasonable age and work hard enough, you can get to the top, doing science, but you do not start it when you are fifty-five!

Enters Ishmael.

“…at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honor…”

Yes, I know.

“The transition is a keen one, I assure you…”

It sure is.

“… and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and

bear it. But even this wears off in time.”

I’ll try to remember.

Ishmael goes out.

First, you start as a student. Slowly you accept the rules, see the vast seas of academic readings and feel the keenness of the transition. However, as you had your own reasons to jump in, you cannot turn around and leave, even if you find yourself at the very beginning…

In the beginning, there was chaos. No, not just chaos. There was also a dangerous mix of frustration, self-reproach for procrastination, the burden of perfectionism, the overwhelming feeling of extreme loneliness and almost total ignorance about how research is done. First, you read set books and you go through coursework, assignments, academic reports, papers, research,

7 thesis, proposal, positioning, methodology, acknowledging, citations, ethics, conflict of interests…

Enters Polonius.

“What do you read, my lord?”

Hamlet’s voice: “Words, words, words…”

Is it the first stage of insanity, Your Excellency, or the beginning of the search for

something tangible?

“Take this from this, if this be otherwise.”

[Points to his head and shoulder.]

So, it is the beginning?

Polonius shrugs his shoulders and goes out.

How do you feel in a situation when everyone around you seems to know what they are doing? They do not ask many questions, they seem completely in tune with what is going on around them. You miss references and meanings, your comments often remain unanswered, you are on your own. You cannot get a single clue of where and how to begin, how to start your journey into the obscurity of the academy, the world which you have always thought of entering but never knew how! You did not know any rules of the game before you jumped into those waters!

Enters Strickland.

“I’ve got to paint. I can’t help myself. When a man falls into the water, it doesn’t matter

how he swims, well or badly: he’s got to get out or else he’ll drown.”

Right! What would you substitute ‘paint’ with? You are here not to produce any work of

art! Or are you? What is that that you want to do? Write… Investigate… Share… Make

sense… Make sense of what? Every other researcher speaks about telling a story. Tell a

story. Tell the story. Tell your story. Is there any sense in that? Is my story worth telling?

And, actually, it should not be about me!

Strickland frowns and goes out.

I have always had difficulty in understanding what it was like to do science in education.

What do we research? Certainly, we can research theoretical foundations of pedagogy, its changing paradigms, how this or that teaching technique works or does not work in class, but how can we do it if all lessons and teachers and students are so different you can hardly evaluate that? How can you test various hypotheses in your classroom if you feel like you cannot sacrifice your teaching time and your students’ learning time to self-observation and analysis, or let an outsider observe you and your students? In case you write about what you think should happen in the classroom when you do this or that activity, is it not common knowledge? Are your colleagues not aware of that? What new ideas are you going to express?

However, I have a feeling that somehow my aspirations are coming together in an unexpected and complex manner as one possible result of my various and often dispersed activities and interests, as I live my life in and out of education in three very different political and social contexts: in the Soviet Union at its high power, during Perestroika and before the

Soviet Union almost unexpected collapse, and later in Ukraine during all the periods of the development of its statehood.

I remember the words of my supervisor, “Write about those things you know well”. So, I start writing.

Textbooks are everywhere. There seems to be no subject or skill which would not have a corresponding coursebook, manual, handbook, how to guide, leaflet or the like…

Still I feel discontented. Every time I read what I have written, I feel dissatisfied, and not because the writing is awkward. It is rather not, but it seemed so obvious and commonplace.

Enters Robinson Crusoe.

“The 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and part of the 12th (for the 11th was Sunday) I took wholly up

to make me a chair, and with much ado brought it to a tolerable shape, but never to

please me; and even in the making I pulled it in pieces several times.”

You too?! I have always admired your consistency and persistence, and your skill!

“I had never handled a tool in my life...”

True! Thanks! I’m not alone, and it seems I can have quite a good company!

Robinson smiles and goes out.

Feeling better? A bit. Well, the thing is I know the theory, I have read enough about how to do research, how to classify and manage data, how to interpret findings, how to tell a story, and more besides – like Robinson Crusoe might know how to make a chair, but never attempted making one before facing the urgent need to do it. I seem not to be afraid of making mistakes. I know the theory and it sounds fine:

Learn from your mistakes! Making mistakes can help you improve ... If you don’t make

mistakes, you probably use only very simple expressions. Be adventurous! Experiment

with new grammar and vocabulary. Sometimes you need to get it wrong before you can

get it right. (Clare & Wilson, 2005, p. 91)

I know all this. I preached that hundreds of times while delivering teacher training workshops and seminars. However, knowing is one thing; being able to avoid making mistakes is quite different. What if people did not find my story interesting or useful due to my lack of academic skills. I have heard words like “It’s not done like this” quite a few times in my life.

Enters Münchhausen.

“Chance and good luck often correct our mistakes.”

Sure. It’s like pulling yourself out of the mire by your own hair…

“…if any of the company entertain a doubt of my veracity, I shall only say to such, I pity

their want of faith, and must request they take leave before I begin the second part of…”

As Münchhausen speaks, enter Raspe and Bürger and take Münchhausen away.

Alone again. However, this time it is different. Thanks to Münchhausen, my loneliness may be my blessing, if I keep not only to seriousness and importance of what I should write about, but to some lightheartedness as well! So, I begin.

The Statement of the Problem

In Ukraine, the practice of teaching English as a foreign language has gone through several stages of development, from forming and taking shape in Soviet reality to reforming and reshaping in post-Soviet context.

The changes concern EFL curricula for different types of schools, the content, teaching methods, principal approaches, relations between the teacher and the society, the support of international organizations, like the British Council and the American Councils for International

Education, and international publishing companies and, among other factors, the emergence of huge market of EFL teaching materials. While still in progress, this process is characterized by the great shift from strictly prescribed textbooks and scarcity of teaching materials in the past to their overabundance in the present.

It is true that Ukrainian teachers of English, like many other non-native English-speaking teachers around the world, rely heavily on using textbooks in their classroom practices.

According to the report of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine (2010) to the

Council of Europe, up to “90 percent of teachers use textbooks while preparing for the lessons”

(p. 33)2. The same report states:

The defining feature of Ukrainian last generation foreign languages textbooks is the usage

of personality-oriented and activity-focused approach in teaching material choice and the

content of education. Such approach allows to forecast the educational process in

accordance with intellectual abilities, interests, foreign language learning readiness,

typological, individual and age characteristics of students. (p. 33)

While certain parts of the statement need to be more accurate and precise, it seems to be clear from the statement that Ukrainian schools are equipped with up-to-date teaching materials, which use cutting-edge methodology and approaches to teach students foreign languages –

English in particular – with the best possible results.

However, similar self-praising paragraphs are quite familiar to those who worked or studied in schools during Soviet times, when critical evaluation of officially approved teaching materials or practice was not favored, to put it mildly. So, while many teachers are critical about textbooks they are using, according to the Ministry of Education, everything seems to be fine with textbooks that are used by foreign language teachers and learners in Ukraine. Too good to be true.

If it were true, teachers would stop criticizing textbooks and would teach in ideal classrooms where they and their students would be equipped with up-to-date learning materials.

If it were true, parents would stop criticizing teachers and educational authorities and would be happy with what their children learn and how they acquire a foreign language. If it were true, students would show fantastic results at tests and language contests of all kinds. If it were true, there would be no place for foreign publishers in the market, but they are there constantly

2 In this paper I translated all quotations from Ukrainian and Russian into English.

12 offering new titles for students of all ages and backgrounds! If just one or two textbooks for schools met the criteria mentioned in the report, no other effort would be necessary in writing any more textbooks, at least not every other year! And still, textbooks are published, new textbook writing contests are organized, and more textbook titles enter the Ministry list of recommended titles for schools almost every year. Moreover, apart from officially recommended textbooks, including ones from international publishers, there are tons of other locally published materials in a book form, which are supposed to enhance learning and teaching English in schools where those “last generation foreign languages textbooks” (p. 33) do not work.

This is the mismatch, if not the huge fault, between what is stated and what happens in the real world of learning and teaching.

Whereas the problem starts to take shape, the buzzing question remains though. It seems that to get rid of the buzz, I should unpack that interrogative sentence: Why am I doing this? or at least unpack those three words, why, I and this.

So, why am I doing this? What is this? Too broad a topic: textbooks, or learning about textbooks, or learning about how textbooks work…

Textbooks are not just books with texts, although they are called like this not only in

English but also in Spanish (libro de texto), French (cahier de texte), Scots Gaelic (leabhar teacsa), Swahili (Kitabu cha maandishi), Welsh (llyfr testun), Irish (téacsleabhar) and in some other languages.

However, there are languages in which the word textbook bears different meanings, which are interesting to study.

So, a textbook means a book for learning in Czech (učebnice), Slovenian (učbenik),

Russian (учебник), Estonian (õpikut), Finninsh (oppikirja), Danish (lærebog), Dutch (leerboek),

It is a book for .(ספר לימוד) Hebrew ,(לערנבוך)Norwegian (lærebok), Serbian (уџбеник), Yiddish teaching in Icelandic (kennslubók), Latvian (mācību grāmata, which can mean a training book),

German (Lehrbuch), Chinese (教科书), Portuguese (livro didático), Swedish (Lärobok),

Vietnamese (sách giáo khoa), Zulu (ibhuku okufundisa). It may mean something you have at hand, like manual in English, manuele in French, manuale in Italian, підручник in Ukrainian, podręcznik in Polish, manual in Romanian, or εγχειρίδιο in Greek. It seems to be limited to a book for school or class in Armenian (դասագիրք), Hungarian (tankönyv), Turkish (ders kitabı),

In Japanese (教科書) and Korean (교과서) it is a book for teaching a .(الكتاب المدرسي) or Arabic subject. In Slovak, there are all the three meanings– textová kniha for a textbook, učebnica for a book for learning, príručka for something you have at hand.

It may sound like a book for reading पाठयपुस्तक in Hindi, a writing book in Maltese ktieb tal-kitba, or just a book in Maori pukapuka. In Lithuanian it is Vadovėlis, which is close in pronunciation to vadovas, which may mean a guide, a leader or even a manager.

However, as the most common word to indicate the book at hand while you are learning or teaching, which sometimes comprise texts of different kind, is textbook, I will use this very word in my present work. Of course, there is one more widely used term, teaching materials, but it is so broad, that it is not often clear what people mean by that.

Whatever you call them, textbooks have always been associated with learning and teaching, or with teaching and learning, which is not the same. Depending on what starts first – learning or teaching – textbooks can either enhance learning or become an instrument of torture.

Textbooks should theoretically reflect existing theory of learning or at least the methods of teaching (Richards, 2001) which are accepted and proclaimed within a certain educational community, be it a separate school or the whole country. The big question is if it is really so?

Textbooks should be of help to teachers and students. They should provide support and scaffold both teachers and students in their classroom activities and communication. They should outline a framework for learning and teaching. In other words, textbooks are there for a reason, and the reason in to enhance learning and teaching. It is a roadmap (Hutchinson & Torres, 1994) of the subject taught and learnt, in our case, the English language.

Why then are good textbooks so scarce? Why teachers and parents keep looking for alternative textbooks and are critical of those that are said to have been published with new approaches in mind? What is wrong with textbooks? Or what is wrong with teachers, parents and students when they persistently reject textbooks? What is wrong with those academic writers who encourage teachers to stop using textbooks? What is the alternative of not having a textbook in class, provided there is an alternative to that in the real conditions of a classroom? How well can teachers do without textbooks if they are tired of them? What do they do when they are?

Do textbooks reflect the existing curriculum, or are curricula written to fit the existing textbooks? Does big circulation always mean that the textbook is successful, written with students (and teachers) in mind and is good for using in the classroom? Is the current situation with critical attitude to textbooks typical for modern educational paradigms, or is it a trend, which is unfortunately continuous? How is the situation with foreign language textbooks different from that with textbook for other subjects?

Who are those mysterious textbook writers? Do they have exceptional skills in writing textbooks just as good writers have skills in writing their stories, novels, poetry or plays? Can a textbook be interesting to read? Can it be enjoyable just as a good poetry or novel, or are textbooks doomed to be informing, instructing, moralizing, bland and boring? Is H.G. Wells’s

Textbook of Zoology (Davis & Wells, 1916) as engaging as his science fiction?

Too many questions for one piece of academic writing, and I do not seem to limit them to something more achievable and tangible until I unpack two other words: I and why.

Now, why am I doing this? What makes me think that I can address the issue in a way that will make the research unbiased and valid, or will it? What skills or expertise do I have that allow me to say that I know something about textbooks what other people may miss? It is true that I may not understand much about textbooks, but I want to understand, and that is what can make my research at least interesting, and in some way novel. As Masuhara (2011) writes that

“teacher’s needs are assumed and not defined” (p. 243), I would humbly add that a great many things about textbooks are assumed and not highlighted. Teachers usually do not have their say about textbooks, because they have other things to attend to, and they often show their attitude to this or that textbook by using them for years or by changing them to ones that seem more appropriate, or, in rare cases, writing one. Could that be a different lens in the case of textbooks?

I have been a teacher for over thirty years, and I have been through different stages of professional development. I started teaching English in 1985 in Ukraine, in a Soviet Ukrainian context. The textbooks that we were supposed to use in class were produced in Moscow by

Moscow authors, and it was the time of no choice. I was a novice teacher who had to stick to the only textbook available and had firm belief in the power of the textbook. Later I lost that blind faith and became quite skeptical about textbooks and their authors.

The only way to survive as a teacher in the situation that followed the collapse of the

Soviet Union was to focus on what we did in class to ensure our students were involved in the process, motivated and busy. I went on to become more flexible with textbooks I used. I taught students of all ages apart from very little ones and I could not imagine my work without any printed material, i.e. a textbook, which were scarce during that transition period. Apart from

Moscow textbooks that were quickly getting out of date and fashion, we would use anything that had the English language in it.

The experience that I had and the feelings that I shared with many of my colleagues made me try to write one, and I co-authored a textbook for primary students. That was totally new experience and totally new attitude to textbooks we had as teaching tools at that time, and it made me study international analogues on the shelves of the British Council Centre in my home city, Kharkiv, Ukraine, and later wherever it was possible. My third role in my relationship with textbooks was the role of a sales representative for Pearson when I had to not only study the main features and benefits of textbooks but also promote them and eventually sell.

During that period, I went from the level of almost complete ignorance about how textbooks differ from one another to the level of understanding how different textbooks work for different teaching and learning situations and how they can help solve problems in the classroom. I totally shared the ideas of Michael West that having better textbooks is one of the ways to improve learning and teaching where teachers are inexperienced or bad (as cited in

Smith, 2003). Frankly, I do not agree with the word bad if referred to teachers, because the word bad, if taken to a different context, may also mean not knowing their subject well enough, novice, inexperienced, overwhelmed, lazy, exhausted, tired, unintelligent, too academic, non-native speaking, forgetful, disorganised, indifferent, impatient, not inspiring confidence or enthusiasm, trustful, distrustful, inattentive, too meticulous, not understanding, ignorant of methods of teaching, authoritarian, too democratic, not approachable and many other epithets, which can be applied at times to anyone who faces a group of students.

However, I should admit that all of the above could be repaired with a good textbook, as textbooks should be written not only for teachers but for students in the first place. So, because

17 our Soviet and post-Soviet teachers were all non-native speaking teachers of English, most of them did not know the language well enough (see, for example, Kreusler, 1963) to do without a textbook in class. A bad textbook combined with teachers’ average knowledge of the language and all of the above metaphors would mean lack of motivation and poor results for students, and it often was. It was with professional development projects of the British Council and the introduction of international brands like Oxford, Pearson or MacMillan that the situation with

English language teaching in schools started to change in the 2000s.

That was the period of change, or I would say constant change, when the National

Curriculum for teaching foreign languages changed more than once and will probably change more than once in the future. One of the aspects of that change concerning textbooks was addressing local culture alongside British and American culture which was present not only in international titles but in local ones as well. British publishers began writing textbook components with pages containing Ukrainian topics and focusing on local celebrities (see, for example, Falla & Davis, 2008). It was often quite mechanical and standard, but it addressed the real need. In 2014 – 2015, I wrote Across Ukraine, a linguistic-cultural component for secondary school students aged 10 to 13. The textbook was initially written to furnish one Pearson title, but later it proved to become an independent title for schools.

In other words, I am undertaking this so that I can bring in not only teacher’s perspective into the question, but also visions from other angles, a textbook promoter, seller and writer, and the researcher’s lens as well.

This finally takes me to unpacking the why, or rather what [am I doing this] for? These are similar questions, but they are subtly different in meaning. One such difference was given to us, a group of students in a positive psychotherapy class, by our teacher, Mark Voronov at

International Academy of Personnel Management in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in 2004. During one lecture, he mentioned that why is a question about the past, while what for is more about present or future. So, it is better not to ask, “Why am I doing this?” but rather “What am I doing this for?” Here, I will try to address both.

Enters Bacon.

“Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man”.

Exactly. I am trying to answer my own question of whether it is a real research or just

inconsistent and overcritical ideas about textbooks by one who has them around him all

his life!

“Every defect of the mind may have a special receipt”.

Thank you!

Bacon bows with dignity and goes out.

That is true. To make anything clear you should write, and it may be the first reason why

I want to put it on paper: to answer those questions which are difficult to identify, which often come and go without being answered. Writing shapes thinking (Langer & Applebee, 1987). So, first, I want to make the matter clear for myself.

However, I am not writing for myself, so there should be other good reasons for addressing the problem of transforming teacher-textbook relationship in its dynamics over a long period of time. It is not about just putting my memories and findings on paper, so my ideas take shape and form.

Indeed, any research should be of benefit to someone, not just to the one who enjoys doing the research. Does this also need to be proved? If done thoroughly enough, this research should not only disclose what is going on in the field of teacher-textbook relation, but also be of

19 some use. As Bochner and Ellis (1996) write, “Should we search for ‘how is it true?’ or really replace the question with ‘how is it useful?’” (p. 11).

If we leave teachers, students and their parents alone, it is clear that there are several other groups close to education, which may find the matter useful.

First, I believe it will definitely be useful for academia, as it strives to give a new angle to the matter: the teacher’s lens, the material writer’s lens, the textbook promoter’s lens and the researcher’s lens all in one place. It may also encourage working teachers to add to this story by joining academia and making this research area classroom and student bound.

Second, it will probably be useful for publishers, especially local ones, as it can show that some research is needed before starting or investing in a textbook project. It may also show what things are better to exclude than to include in a textbook, and that many textbook writers should not invent activities or assume that students act as uniform obedient mass, or pretend to be innovative, but rather know classroom realities and know how textbooks are written with students in mind.

Then, it will possibly be useful for boards of education and school administrations in terms of relying more on teachers’ opinions about the choice of textbooks, or piloting textbooks before purchasing them, instead of following trends or trusting brands and let teachers face it.

Finally, it may be potentially useful for Ministries of Education, as they are the ones who often support and/or invest in various textbook projects and should evaluate the cost of providing schools and teachers with something that may have an adverse effect on the teaching and learning process.

This attempt to bridge or at least to identify some gaps, regarding textbooks the way different agents in education see them, is one good reason for doing this research. And there is at

20 least one more.

Apple (2004) states that the question of what is taught in schools is “not ‘only’ an educational issue, but one that is inherently ideological and political” (p. xix). He means textbooks as well, and although he refers mainly to historical ones, the issue becomes more significant in reference to teaching English as a foreign language in Ukraine, as attitude to

English as a school subject there has changed dramatically in the course of the last thirty years.

These days in Ukraine English is taught from Grade 1 to Grade 12, and the number of teaching hours ranges from 2 to 9 per week depending on the type of school. There are sometimes more teaching hours of English than those of science, math or social studies. From being just another school subject English evolved into a powerful means of forming students’ outlook, and this is why it is worth looking closely at and investigating the main tool which teachers use in their conscious or non-conscious efforts to shape their students’ emerging identities.

Research questions

Now that much of the buzzing calms down with questions not yet solved but at least addressed, research questions are still there waiting to take shape. They are not about what am I doing this for? They are about what I will focus on initially to identify reasons for the existing situation with EFL textbooks in Ukraine and outline possible ways to repair it. By investigating the relationship between a working non-native English speaking teacher and textbooks they use in or produce for their classroom practices, I intend to address the following research questions:

How did EFL textbooks develop in Ukraine in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts?

How do different textbooks shape teacher’s actions at different stages of teacher development in response to continuously changing trends in education?

How does EFL teacher-textbook relationship transform over time due to professional, social and political changes?

How do self-developed EFL materials add to and shape teaching practices?

Enters Stephen Leacock.

“He flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all

directions”.

Okay, okay, I can narrow it... I can focus... I think...

Leacock shrugs his shoulders and leaves.

The study covers a period between the mid-1980s and the mid-2010s and reflects my own experience with different EFL textbooks as a teacher, a teacher trainer, a textbook promoter and material writer and provides vignettes from my experience with some textbooks as both a student at school and university in Ukraine. The study will describe my experience of having to deal with English textbooks both in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts, the ways I dealt with different classroom situations related to using or not using a textbook and provide retrospective on the development of local English textbooks published and used in Ukraine. Every section will be illustrated with examples from materials tailored for specific teaching situations.

Enters Johannes Gutenberg.

“It is a press, certainly, but a press from which shall flow in inexhaustible streams...”

Oh, I see, it’s time to discover what books say…

Gutenberg smiles and says nothing.

I go out to investigate.

Chapter 2

Books about Books

Literature Review

The role of books in the life of humans, as well as in the area of educating humans, has not been completely marred by the development of technology or any other progressive ideas and consequently is not challenged. The role of textbooks in the life of teachers and learners has always remained one popular target for debate and criticism from all possible levels of authority or expertise. It is extremely hard to navigate in that avalanche of criticism of the existing textbooks, which is often justified, reasonable and sound, and response to that criticism, which is also argumentative, logical and convincing. Besides, it is not always textbooks that are in focus: there are also methods, language, culture, topics, tasks, learners, teachers, publishers, authors, to name a few.

Moreover, when it comes to textbooks, conclusions that educational audience draws from multiple publications are often the product of oversimplification and hasty generalization. With catchy and memorable article titles – Why students aren’t learning very much from textbooks

(Tyson & Woodward, 1989), What do we need teaching materials for? (Allwright, 1981),

Overcoming textbook fatigue (Lent, 2012), Resisting coursebooks (Thornbury, 2013) – academic writers often penetrate into research areas other than those they intend to investigate. It is also problematic at times to identify the target reader for academic publications which deal with textbooks, to make informed decisions based on ideas, which refer to other areas. So, we do need classification to put ideas in order, as well as in time and in space.

Harwood (2014) outlines three main areas of textbook research: (1) content; (2) consumption and (3) production. In content area he offers to study topic inclusion and exclusion,

23 linguistic aspects of textbooks, pedagogy and culture. In the consumption area he suggests examining how textbooks are used by teachers and learners. The production area is about studying processes of writing and designing a textbook, shaping it, authoring, distribution, publishers’ part of the process, promotion, piloting, post-adoption analysis, etc., as well as

“norms and values of textbook industry as a whole” (p. 2).

Such division seems to be quite reasonable as it allows a researcher to avoid irrelevant topics while navigating the flow of publications, narrow the search, and focus on specific areas which correspond to their academic interests. What seems to be necessary to highlight is that such division is not rigid and does not have any clear borders. It is rather flexible and there are definite overlapping segments between all the categories.

Thus, if anyone’s interest is in how textbooks are perceived by students or used by teachers, and if it seems to be in the consumption area of research, they cannot ignore the other two or avoid referring to them. If we look into a classroom, we could see that some parts of a textbook are used as prescribed in the Teacher’s Book, some are adapted, and some are replaced or ignored. That may relate either to content, which students or teacher may find unsuitable or bland, or its level of difficulty, or the way the material is presented and organized, its relevance to students’ needs or age group, or the teacher’s inability to accept the approach or method offered in the textbook. At the same time, if teachers ignore certain type of tasks, or students get bored with certain activities in the textbook, and if research is about piloting parts of a new textbook, it is not exclusively about consumption or production. The former may relate to the lack of teaching skills or mastery (consumption), and the analysis of such data may not give publishers better knowledge of how to adapt their textbooks – if they choose to do so – to the needs of the market.

Having accepted such division – however rigid or flexible – helps to channel the growing flow of publications in relation to our research area: transforming a non-native English-speaking teacher’s relationship with their textbooks.

Early critique of textbooks was not critique of textbooks, but rather of methods embodied in those. Back in 1896, at the 35th Annual Meeting of US National Educational Association,

Professor Krug (1896), of the Central High School, of Cleveland, Ohio, made a report on “the recent changes in methods of teaching foreign languages” (p. 575) and the appropriateness of those methods for schools. He analyzed three groups of methods: (1) the objective methods, as he called it, i.e. Berlitz method; (2) the analytical methods, from Jacotot to Toussaint-

Langenscheidt; and (3) the colloquial methods represented by “Ollendorf and his many imitators” (p. 575). Although Berlitz method received less criticism, Krug was a severe critic of all the three groups and sometimes far from being politically or academically correct, as he did not need to be. However, in conclusion, he outlined some features of the “new methods” which

“indicate progress or improvement” (p. 584). It is an interesting read, where one finds ideas that were topical decades if not a century later: “…the students’ precious hours should not be wasted in sterile reasoning about a language, when they might be profitably invested for the purpose of acquiring practical knowledge and mastership” (p. 576).

However critical Krug (1896) could have been, his report is the evidence of several important trends. First, there is a gap, if not a fault, between those who teach and those who develop methods or/and textbooks. The we-know-our-students’-needs-better stand can be clearly inferred from the report. Second, it envisioned the limitations of single separate methods and in a way called for a form of reasonable eclecticism in teaching foreign languages. Third, it did not contain any educational dogmas and extremes. It showed the need for change in foreign language

25 teaching and that the change should happen rather slowly: “Let us be careful, cautious, and slow in adopting new ways” (p. 585). All those trends are still here today.

That was the time when textbooks were reflections of methods developed mainly by individuals like Berlitz, Ollendorf, Toussaint and Langenscheidt, Gouin, and others.

In the first half of the 20th century, the situation did not change much, and English language teaching (ELT) textbooks were also firmly associated with the names of their authors:

Palmer, West, Eckersley, Hornby. Some, like Eckersley, focused mainly on writing textbooks and did not write many theoretical works. Others, like Palmer, West or Hornby, were also known as developers of methods (Smith, 2003). So, Palmer was considered the author of oral method;

West was known for developing graded reading and what was knows as New Method English;

Hornby’s Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English and Oxford Progressive

English Course were waymarks in English language teaching. They were not only researchers, linguists, or writers. They were all teachers at different times in their careers. Their ideas and the textbooks they wrote came form their research and classroom practice: textbooks “written from the back of the classroom” (West, 1960, p. 74).

One can argue about the validity of their methods if studied from different angles, but it is true that most of their methodological findings made the foundation of modern English language teaching (Smith, 2003) and are still in use today both in classrooms and in textbooks.

The first half of the 20th century also saw the emergence of a different approach to textbooks and the methods they reflected. As my story begins in the Soviet Union, it is worth looking at the way textbooks were developed in the country, which became more and more isolated from the rest of the world. Alongside individual textbook writers, whose work was more and more influenced by the conscious-comparative method of teaching foreign languages, the

26 main body responsible for generating methods of learning and textbook production was the

Institute of Methods of Teaching at the All-Union Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. It consisted of different sectors. The Sector of Foreign Languages outlined the policy in foreign languages learning and teaching. The work of the Sector resulted in poor quality textbooks for all schools in the Soviet Union. In the 1950s, the textbooks and the method were justly criticized by many (see, for example, Anichkov,1957; Chernycheva, 1954; Gorelov & Nedyalkov, 1957;

Matusova, 1954; Zvegintsev, 1953, 1954). Many of those critical ideas are still topical today.

So, Tsetlin (1954), being an advocate of the Sector’s ideas, expressed doubts that majority of foreign language teachers could teach well without properly constructed textbooks, and that adapting and repairing the existing ones was hard for an average teacher.

This clearly indicates that contemporary debate of teacher-textbook relations and teachers-as-material-writers side of the debate have roots in distant past. In the situation, where practically all teachers of the English language were non-native speakers of English, it was clearly shown, that such teachers did not have necessary qualifications and skills to “creatively develop existing textbooks” (Tsetlin, 1954, p. 103).

The debate gave impulse for certain changes in the area of teaching foreign languages and in the developing the theory of the textbook in the Soviet Union.

In the west, the theory of the EFL textbook was started by Michael West, who devoted one chapter of his Teaching English in difficult circumstances (1960) to the problem of the textbook and in particular wrote about the state of textbook production in the Soviet Union. He firmly believed that the only way to improve the situation where teachers were not to professional enough was to equip them with better textbooks (see Smith, 2003).

For some time in the 1960s and early 1970s, textbooks were regarded as an additional or

27 auxiliary tool in the teaching and learning process. So, Byrne (1977) in his book Teaching oral

English, aimed both for native and non-native English-speaking teachers, wrote,

The textbook should be regarded as a form of visual aid whose primary function is to

reinforce what has been learnt orally. Ideally, oral work should be carried out as far as

possible without recourse to a written text (on the part of the learners). (p. 128)

Here, Byrne put an equals sign between text and textbook, although in his previous chapters he stated, “Topics can also be presented through the medium of text alone” (p. 92) and devoted the whole chapter to “The use of texts” while avoiding the term textbook. French (1963) used the term workbook when referring to printed materials and also spoke of them as aids in developing different linguistic skills.

At the same time the Western EFL school saw the rise of such writers as Louis

Alexander, Robert O’Neill, Peter Viney, those who managed to make the textbook story-based and take textbook writing to the new level (see Prodromou & Mishen, 2008). The shift to communicative language teaching brought textbooks such as Strategies (Abbs & Freebairn,

1980), and in 1986 Oxford University Press published Headway (Soars and Soars, 1986). After that the EFL textbook changed its layout and philosophy forever.

Ironically, the 1980s became the turning point in the discussion on the role of textbooks in a language classroom. Allwright (1981) writes his profoundly cited article What do we want teaching materials for? O’Neill (1982) replies with Why use textbooks? and the debate takes a new turn, this time to go through years and decades with many academic writers joining it. Grant

(1987) writes his Making the most of your textbook, in which he outlines four main approaches teachers can take while working with textbook material, i.e. omit, add, adapt or replace it. Those ways of adapting textbooks to teachers’ and students’ needs were later described and/or adapted

28 by Maley (2011), McDonough & Shaw (2003), Thornbury (2013) and many others.

The modern research on textbooks started to take shape in the mid-1990s with the foundation of MATSDA (MATerialS Development Association) by Brian Tomlinson. More publications followed (see Gray, 2013; Harwood, 2010, 2014; Hutchinson & Torres, 1994;

Maley, 2003; Richards, 2001; Tomlinson, 1995; Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2010,), and the research on textbooks started to go “from mush to complexity” (Christian, 2011).

In general, all publications related to textbooks can be divided into two categories based on the focus of writers’ attention. The first category is rather broad and deals with teaching and learning English as a foreign language, methods, approaches or skills development. Textbooks are not central and are mentioned in reference to other topics (see, for example, Nunan & Lamb,

1996).

In the other category, publications place textbooks in the center and bring other topics in relation with them. Many publications, like Grant’s (1987), offer a certain mode to classify research, as editors and researchers collect related articles and chapters into groups. This makes certain areas of textbook research more distinguishable. Those bigger areas are as follows:

- Types of textbooks in use, ranging from textbooks for young learners to English for specific purposes (see, for example, Arnold & Rixon, 2008; Barnard & Zemach, 2003; Bosher,

2010; Cook, 2003; Hewings, 2010; Islam, 2003; Masuhara & Tomlinson, 2008; Prodromou &

Mishen, 2008). Works in this category describe types of EFL textbooks used for different purposes with students of different age groups, cultural backgrounds, etc. They outline what is typical for various types of textbooks, generalize main features and benefits or flaws and deficiencies of materials in focus. This area is close to the following one, which comprises publications on

- principles of writing ELT materials and textbooks or reflections on how such projects were completed in the past (see, for example, Bell & Gower, 1998/2011; Ellis, 2010; Jolly &

Bolitho, 2011; Katz, Byrkun & Sullivan, 2008; Mares, 2003; Masuhara, 2003; Nation, 2003;

Popovici & Bolitho, 2003; Tomlinson, 2010). This category is rather broad, considering the versatility of materials used in English language teaching and the writing practices and experiences of authors both local (Popovici & Bolitho, 2011) and international (Bell & Gower,

1998/2011). Besides, the category of principles in materials/textbook development is organically linked with the category of

- evaluation and selection of textbooks. These often provide different lists of criteria for evaluating and/or choosing published ELT materials (see, for example, Ansary & Babaii, 2002;

Ellis, 2011; McGrath, 2002; Mukundan & Ahour, 2010; Mukundan, Hajimohammadi &

Nimehchisalem, 2011; Saraceni, 2003; Tomlinson, 2003, 2013). Typical publications from this category, apart from some exceptions, tend to be repetitive and uniform in that they argue about what EFL/ESL textbook should be like without providing any tangible examples. They often resemble the continuous debate on teaching the language vs. teaching about the language. It seems that there are many people, who know how to write good textbooks, but very few can.

The categories mentioned above belong mainly to content and production areas

(Harwood, 2014) of textbook research and comprise publications, which are in general balanced, argumentative and neutral in tone. However, bigger divergences emerge within the consumption area (Harwood, 2014). One part of publications in consumption category are about the role of textbooks – or very often international publishers – in influencing ELT practices around the world or locally, or about taking sides in the debate of pros and cons of having textbooks as the main tool or guide in teachers’ work. It is here that opposite ideas clash and result in

30 controversies in academic world and confusion in educators’ heads.

The publications on the role of textbooks range from those which admit the positive change imposed by textbooks and assign the textbook the role of essential element in curriculum

(see, for example, Hutchinson and Torres, 1994) to those which are highly critical of the role of textbooks and/or publishers in shaping local ELT curricula or even methods of teaching (see, for example, Canagarajah, 1999, 2012; Kumaravadivelu, 2003; Thornbury, 2000, 2013).

Unfortunately, the lack of accuracy in meanings creates more confusion here.

One of the extreme views on negative impact textbooks have on learning comes from

Thornbury (2000, 2013), whose critical attitude towards textbooks has not changed since 2000.

In Critical perspectives on language teaching materials (Gray, Ed., 2013), Chapter 10 is titled

Resisting coursebooks (Thornbury, 2013). However, while providing evidence to support his idea that textbooks are “fundamentally flawed” (p. 205), Thornbury (2013) refers to the negative attitude to textbooks of prominent figures in education, and that is where the mismatch between arguments and facts lies.

So, Thornbury (2013) refers to Dewey’s (1938/1997) words – “the sound idea that education should derive its materials from present experience” (p. 77) – as those that challenge

“the idea that a curriculum based on past experience, as mediated by remote scholars and enshrined in a textbook that is published off-site, has any potency” (Thornbury, 2013, p. 206).

Unfortunately, Dewey’s (1938/1997) words are taken out of the context. If we read around the cited words, we will see that Dewey meant something different:

Because the studies of the traditional school consisted of subject-matter that was selected

and arranged on the basis of the judgment of adults as to what would be useful for the

young sometime in the future, the material to be learnt was settled upon outside the

present life-experience of the learner. In consequence, it had to do with the past; it was

such as had proved useful to men in past ages. By reaction to an opposite extreme, as

unfortunate as it was probably natural under the circumstances, the sound idea that

education should derive its materials from present experience and should enable the

learner to cope with the problems of the present and future has often been converted into

the idea that progressive schools can to a very large extend ignore the past. If the present

could be cut from the past, the conclusion would be sound. But the achievements of the

past provide the only means at command for understanding the present. (p. 77)

In fact, here Dewey (1938/1997) did not write about resisting or rejecting textbooks or other materials. He said that they should be relevant and up-to-date and warned against extremes in judgments and conclusions based on hasty generalizations. In the following page, he added,

“It is a ground for legitimate criticism, however, when the ongoing movement of progressive education fails to recognize that the problem of selection and organization of subject-matter for study and learning is fundamental (emphasis added)” (p. 78).

Is it not about careful selection of material in contrast with constant improvisation in the classroom? Dewey was not against having teaching materials as such, he was against thoughtless and careless interpretation of ideas behind progressive education.

Thornbury (2013) mentions it very briefly and goes on to refer to Piaget’s idea that “the ideal school would not have compulsory textbooks” (p. 206). Idealistically speaking, the ideal school will not have textbooks, or grades, or tests, or classrooms to name a few. The ideal school will be very different from today’s school. In the ideal school all students are motivated, smart and diligent, and teachers are devoted to what they do in and out of class. However, as Goethe said, “the one [the real] is never with impunity confounded with the other [the ideal]” (Goethe,

1963, p. 147), and it is especially true about the world of education, which is characterized by textbooks, questions and answers, grades or tests. Real schools are often about classes where many students do not learn, and many teachers do not teach. However, while many agree that there are no simple recipes for the classroom, some teachers seriously ask if they should abandon textbooks, and whether students will really benefit from that.

One more citation in Thornbury’s (2013) chapter deserves attention. He cites Postman and Weingartner (1969) who claimed that “with two or three exceptions all text[book]s are not only boring (…), they are either worthless or harmful” (p. 211). It is another categorical and non- specifying statement, which nevertheless mentions two or three exceptions while labeling other textbooks as worthless or harmful. It is an example of an argument where readers remember worthless or harmful and forget about the exceptions, which make the difference.

With the same effect, Thornbury (2013) refers to Montessori, Freinet, Vygotsky, Krashen with the only objective – to prove that all of them criticized or rejected textbooks as such. He then makes a conclusion that, based on the examples from the authors mentioned, modern language teaching coursebooks should also be resisted and rejected. Although we can assume and agree that all the people mentioned in the chapter opposed textbooks, we should admit that all of them might have meant textbooks of the 1910s, or the 1920s, or the 1960s, many of which deserved to go into oblivion and were different from those in use today. However, to project that attitude to modern language coursebooks is to argue that language textbooks have not changed at all throughout all these years.

Some other questions remain as well. Does anyone still believe that all teachers start their lessons with “Now, open your [text]books!”, and even if they do, does it mean that textbooks they use are bad or should be eliminated from the classroom? Has anyone tried to teach without a

33 textbook during one whole academic year, not just a couple of classes just for fun? These are the questions, that require detailed and often subjective attention from within the classroom, and this leads us to that part of consumption area of textbook research, which is about how teachers and learners use textbooks (Harwood, 2014).

However, because “teacher’s needs are assumed and not defined” (Masuhara, 2011, p.

243), very often researchers and teachers are placed in diametrically opposite positions in their relation to textbooks.

So, Harmer (1998), while speaking about teachers overusing a textbook, says that in so doing teachers remove “the very possibility of Engagement which its writer(s) hoped to provoke in the first place” (p. 117). This brings me back to Dewey’s (1938/1997) words, that people “like to think in terms of extreme opposites” (p. 17). So, it seems that, while speaking about removing the possibility of Engagement, Harmer assumes that textbook writers “in the first place” think of engaging students into certain activities, while teachers for some reason prevent it from happening and spoil the good intentions of the authors. Many textbook writers piously believe it as well. Many practicing teachers, while thinking in “extreme opposites”, state that no textbook writer knows their students better than they do, thus labeling many textbooks as unsuitable

(though strongly recommended by educational authorities) for their immediate classroom needs and the needs of their students. In other words, what writers find engaging, teachers do not. This creates a situation, when numerous publications, from Grant (1987) and Cunningsworth (1995) to Saraceni (2013), tell teachers what they should do to make the most of their textbooks, while teachers want textbooks which they can use without much extra work (Masuhara, 2011). The debate goes again as far as raising a question of whether to use textbooks or any other materials at all (Thornbury, 2000, 2013; Thornbury & Meddings, 2009). The last, but not least, area of

34 textbook research – textbooks in classrooms, or how teachers and learners perceive and use textbooks – may have answers to these questions.

This area is only beginning to claim its place within the classification and is comparatively small compared to the other ones and significantly different, but the need to look directly into the classroom is becoming more and more obvious. Littlejohn (2011) justly mentions, “Analyzing materials ... is quite a different matter from analyzing ‘materials-in- action’” (p. 181). Menkabu & Harwood (2014) write about limitation of studies of textbook content, because “they are not anchored to the classroom context” (p. 148). Masuhara (2011) maintains, “The study of teachers’ wants may reveal their preference for materials and for methods that could eventually lead to effective language learning” (p. 243).

A number of publications focus on textbooks in the classroom (see, for example,

Grammatosi & Harwood, 2014; Hutchinson, 1996; Lee & Bathmaker, 2007; Menkabu &

Harwood, 2014; Shawer, 2010). The findings are mainly based on observations, teachers’ and/or students’ questionnaires and interviews outlining the multiple factors that influence textbook use

(see Hutchinson, 1996; Menkabu & Harwood, 2014), one of which is the teacher with their values, beliefs, attitudes and actions.

At the same time, teachers’ opinions about textbooks and their practices are interpreted the way researchers see, hear and understand them. The account of direct experience of teacher- textbook relationship is hard to find, it is hard to find the account of how such relationship changes over time. A possible reason for the absence of such research is that a different method is required, a method not from outside but from within.

The current research is one attempt to bridge that gap.

Chapter 3

In Search of Methodology

“Though this be madness, yet there is a method in’t.”

Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene II.

In my endeavor to describe, interpret and make sense of the transformation of a teacher’s relations with the textbook over quite a long period, the choice of methodology has not been an easy one. I started the journey into the academic world, when most people of my age in my country start thinking of retirement. I left the world of stability to go after my aspiration to do academic research in the area of education, although, as I later discovered, I was not quite prepared for the journey. Whereas I knew quite well the realities of education and the practical side of the teaching job, the research approaches and tools – the how-you-do-it part – was extremely vague and undefined. How do I make sure my research is real, objective, verified, valid, reliable and trusted? What do I have to do to make it perfect? Some connotations of the word objective make me think of a situation where I should be unbiased, unprejudiced and detached from what I am about to study… and I just know I cannot. I cannot make myself detached from what I will be studying; I cannot visualize myself to be writing about a topic in education and analyzing it without emotion. My emotionality and my subjectivity get in the way.

Moreover, the very sound of the word perfect brings back the associations with perfectionism. I know I hate myself for these efforts of mine to strive for something perfect and then for dropping some of my projects, because I saw they were not flawless. Furthermore, how can I pretend I have no influence on my research procedures or findings, when I do bring my self into my studies? How can I position myself over the debate of whether teachers need a textbook in their classrooms or not, of how they regard textbooks, and how we should treat the textbook we have

36 to teach with? I am not over the debate. I am in the midst of it. So, what arguments should I present, and how should I present them? What do I have to do with my experience and my values? Are they obstacles or are they the foundations of the study?

The answers come when I go back to my coursework and try to find out what research methods resonate with me and why. In fact, they all do one way or another, but I understand that there is one, that matches my needs as a researcher best. “Autoethnography is one of the approaches that acknowledges and accommodates subjectivity, emotionality, and the researcher's influence on research, rather than hiding from these matters or assuming they don't exist” (Ellis,

C., Adams, T., & Bochner, A., 2011, p. 274). So, if I cannot avoid subjectivity, emotionality, and my own influence on the research, if I want to make good use of my teaching experience, then it is autoethnography that allows me to do so.

I have always been into a good story, reading it, telling it, interpreting established meanings and finding new ones, looking for metaphors and building on those later. “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (King, 2003, p. 122). Education itself is a story. It is not about teaching rules, laws, facts or dates. It is not only about what. It is also about how.

Education is not about classifications and types, as “human phenomena don’t arrange themselves obligingly into types” (Ellis & Bochner, 1996, p. 28; see also Henry, 1993, p. xvi). Education is a long story of discovery. It is a story of personal development. It is a story of personal, emotional, social, political, and any other kind of growth, and autoethnography allows one to unfold such stories. I could see that autoethnography matched my expectations again:

Тhе “research text” is the story (emphasis added), complete (but open) in itself, largely

free of academic jargon and abstracted theory. The authors privilege stories over analysis,

allowing and encouraging alternative readings and multiple interpretations. They ask their

readers to feel the truth of their stories and to become coparticipants, engaging the

storyline morally, emotionally, aesthetically and intellectually. (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p.

245)

It is autoethnography, which is “both process and product” (Ellis, Adams & Bochner,

2011, p. 273), that gives one the opportunity to “describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)” (Ellis, Adams &

Bochner, 2011, p. 273; see also Ellis, 2004; Jones, 2005), to combine “cultural analysis and interpretation with narrative details” (Chang, 2008, p. 46).

However, is not always easy to define autoethnography. As Ellis and Bochner (2000) maintain, “the meanings and applications of autoethnography have evolved in а manner that makes precise definition and application difficult” (p. 739). Having read different definitions of autoethnography as method, I could see how different interpretations of the term make one common definition impossible. Autoethnographic texts vary so much in themes and forms of expression that one should think carefully of what their own way into autoethnography is going to be like. Still, you build on those definitions that resonate best with your aspirations and with your goals:

“…Autoethnography is an attempt to interpret the public and private dimensions of cultural experience and seek a critical distance and perspective on each” (Neumann, 1996, p.

192).

“It is a discursive activity that finds its bearings, practice, and value as a response to the ambiguities of a particular cultural and historical context” (Neumann, 1996, p. 193).

“Setting а scene, telling а story, weaving intricate connections among life and art, experience and theory, evocation and explanation… and then letting go, hoping for readers who

38 will bring the same careful attention to your words in the context of their own lives” (Jones,

2005, p. 765).

Ellis, Adams and Bochner (2011) add to these:

When researchers write autoethnographies, they seek to produce aesthetic and evocative

thick descriptions of personal and interpersonal experience. They accomplish this by first

discerning patterns of cultural experience evidenced by field notes, interviews, and/or

artifacts, and then describing these patterns using facets of storytelling (e.g. character and

plot development), showing and telling, and alterations of authorial voice. (p. 277).

For me, autoethnographic approach involves building on memories, texts of different kinds, textbooks, other artifacts, viewed by myself as a novice and, later, an experienced teacher, sales rep, teacher trainer, material writer of different level of mastery, and then making it all into a story, taking a different lens and looking at all that with an interpretive eye.

I started to see autoethnography both as method and as a road so appealing and yet so hard to take (Wall, 2008). It is appealing because it allows me to explore the topic of my interest drawing on my experience as a teacher, teacher trainer, textbook promoter, and material writer without being sententious or moralizing. It is appealing because it allows me to look meaningfully in what I have been doing for all these years and make sense of myself in all those roles. Autoethnography will let me see connections and patterns better that any other narrative inquiry can. It is appealing, because it is about “describing studies and procedures that connect the personal to the cultural” (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p. 733), and teaching has always been personal to me, as teaching any subject is always about teaching culture and teaching within culture.

On the other hand, it is hard, because there are no prescribed ways and steps to doing

39 autoethnography, and besides, “autoethnography can be a very difficult undertaking because this form of scholarship highlights more than ever issues of representation, ‘objectivity’, data quality, legitimacy, and ethics” (Wall, 2008, p. 39). It is hard because, as Chang (2008) writes, “The autoethnographic research process is not linear in the sense that one activity leads to the next one and so on until you reach the final destination. Instead, research steps overlap, sometimes returning you to previous steps. One activity informs and modifies another” (p. 121). It is not only not linear, it is also about not sliding to mere biographical storytelling. One has to balance between self and others, private and social, personal and political, and in doing so one should manage to make the audience co-creators of meanings (Chang, 2008).

“Autoethnography writes а world in а state of flux and movement between story and context, writer and reader, crisis and denouement. It creates charged moments of clarity, connection, and change” (Jones, 2005, p. 764). Making your autoethnographic text coherent, resonating, and stringent is not an easy task.

Nevertheless, I am about to start a journey into the past and back to the present, describing my personal experience of dealing with textbooks in different historical, political, social, and professional contexts. I am going to describe how such relationships change over time as we struggle to make sense of our experience, and I will try, with my personal text, to “mоvе writers and readers, subjects and objects, tellers and listeners into this space of dialogue, debate, and change” (Jones, 2005, p. 764). I will build on my experiences with textbooks as agents of change (Hutchinson & Torres, 1994), to answer the question of how teacher-textbook relations transform over time due to professional, social and political changes, and, more specifically, on how textbooks shape teaching practices depending on the context, how textbooks make a teacher understand themselves and their students’ needs over time, how a teacher acts to ensure that

40 textbooks serve the goals of informing, educating and developing students and teachers themselves, and how a teacher acts to stay on track if textbooks do not meet those goals.

The question now is how autoethnography will allow me to study the problem, what it does to answer the questions in focus, and how I do it. Chang (2008) writes that autoethnography

“(1) offers а rеsearсh method friendly to researchers and readers; (2) it enhances cultural understanding of self and others; and (3) it has а potential to transform self and others to motivate them to work toward cross-cultural coalition building” (p. 52).

Autoethnography exploits certain methodological strategies, among which are personal experience methods, biographical method, narrative inquiry, systematic sociological introspection (Ellis, 2007). It uses dialogue, scenes, plot to describe and interpret concrete actions, emotions, artifacts (see Bochner & Ellis, 1996; Chang 2008; Denzin, 2014; Ellis, 2007).

It also celebrates writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson, 1994) in that through writing one can “learn about the topics and about themselves that which was unknowable and unimaginable using conventional analytical procedures, metaphors and writing formats” (Richardson & St.

Pierre, 2005, p. 963). It admits that “writing is thinking, writing is analysis, writing is indeed a seductive and tangled method of discovery” (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005, p. 967), and by doing so we can talk about “producing different knowledge and producing knowledge differently” (St. Pierre, 1997, p. 175). Such detailed writing is about “understanding things and events through direct engagement”, understanding “how researchers’ own lived experiences frame their decisions regarding research questions, understanding, and interpretations” (Berg,

2008, p. 322).

All this shows that autoethnography is the methodological tool, which can provide a careful and inside, although subjective, description of the process of development relations

41 between a teacher and their textbooks. Personal stories and vignettes may evoke unexpected interpretations, further epiphanies, hidden parallels and meanings. At the heart of this inquiry, there is a quest for making meaning of the experience of a language teacher, who has to use textbooks at hand, repair or ignore possible mismatches between writers’ assumptions and concrete classroom realities, adapt or produce teaching materials and other aids from the very first days of teaching. That “thick description” (Greetz, 1973) of my personal memories, experiences and artifacts will become a methodological tool, with which I will try to connect with broader professional and cultural tenets. Denzin (2006) describes it as follows, “In bringing the past into the autobiographical present, I insert myself into the past and create the conditions for rewriting and hence re-experiencing it” (p. 423).

I am using an autoethnographic narrative to make sense of my experience as a student, teacher, teacher trainer, and writer to offer a critical analysis of teacher-textbook relations while moving from self to others and culture, just as Jones (2005) writes about “the personal text as critical intervention in social, political and cultural life” (p. 763).

So, I define this research project as autoethnographic study of my own experience as a teacher, learner, teacher trainer and materials writer in relation to textbooks as pedagogical, educational and sociocultural tools.

How do I position myself within my research project to better study teacher-textbook relations, to provide accurate account of teaching and learning situations related to the question, to challenge the authority of educational expert researchers, who seem to know a lot about theoretical framework for textbook writing but sometimes seem to ignore classroom realities?

How do I study the changing impact of my own assumptions on my teaching ways? Am I more of a researcher or a teacher? The answer should be clear, but it is not. Even when I do research, I

42 still cannot stop being a teacher, seeing myself in a classroom and looking into the eyes of my students, however interested or bored they could be. Can I be both? As Kincheloe, McLaren and

Steinberg (2011) write, “Teachers must join the culture of researchers if a new level of educational rigor and quality is ever to be achieved” (p. 165). And then, as teachers “appreciate the benefits of research [and] relate to understanding the forces shaping education that fall outside their immediate experience and perception, [they] begin to understand what they know from experience. With this in mind they gain heightened awareness of how they can contribute to the research on education” (p. 166).

However, as I mainly speak of myself as a teacher of English as a foreign language, I should also mention my other activities and jobs, which can add a lot to my story. First, I am a non-native English-speaking teacher, who started teaching when the Iron Curtain only started to disappear. Second, although I have never stopped teaching since I started my career in the mid-

1980s, I also held other positions and was engaged in other projects, which were directly related to education and/or teaching English as a foreign language. So, in 1995, I became the Teacher of the Year in Kharkiv region (Ukraine), which broadened my professional network in the region.

In the same year, I participated in the British Council summer school “Teaching English to young learners” at the University of Leeds (UK), and in 1997, in a professional eight-week seminar at the University of Delaware (US) as a national winner of the program “US – Ukraine

Awards for Excellence in Teaching”. In the early 2000s, I joined the Professional Development

Team project of the British Council, and later became a Pearson sales representative and teacher trainer in Eastern Ukraine. During all these years I was directly or indirectly involved in using, evaluating and writing teaching materials and/or textbooks.

Still, it is teaching and dealing with textbooks in different dimensions that would let me

43 keep feeling the pulse of the classroom and at the same time see the change in relationships between myself as a teacher, and the textbooks, which I used in class. So, such multifaceted experience will help me analyze the problem from different angles.

Ellis and Bochner (1996) admit that many autoethnographic researchers “are struggling with the dilemma of how to position themselves within their research projects to reveal aspects of their own tacit world, challenge their own assumptions, locate themselves through the eyes of the Other, and observe themselves observing” (p. 28). They add that it is “the struggle to gain legitimacy for alternative models of expression” (p. 29).

While trying to position myself, I consider the three ways mentioned by Chang (2008) in her Autoethnography as Method. The first one is investigating myself as the main character with others as supporting actors in the story. The second option is giving others more voice and participation, making them co-informants and co-participants. The third one is about focusing on others as part of my own world (see Chang, 2008, p. 65). The way which seems preferable for me regarding teacher-textbook relations is the first one.

I understand that I cannot build on the experience of others as certain factors make such study difficult if not impossible. If I tried to understand and describe others and their relationships with textbooks, it might turn out to be too broad a study, and for this very reason rather inaccurate. If we had one textbook in focus, then it would be reasonable to investigate how different teachers regard this one textbook and/or used it in their classrooms. In that case, detailed questionnaires, interviews and focused group discussions would be reasonable, and the validity of the research would depend on the number of teachers participating in the study.

However, this would entail conducting numerous interviews to identify common ideas and patterns, and as Young, Ingram, and Swartz (1990) write, “Frequently, the need to collect data

44 from large numbers of people means that only very superficial questions can be asked” (p. 3).

Does it not mean that only very superficial answers can be given, while we should be looking for meaningful and detailed ones?

Moreover, teachers very rarely share their impressions and stories of using this or that textbook in class. “Teachers may or may not be able to articulate their answers. They may contradict themselves. Their views and opinions are likely to be different from each other”

(Masuhara, 2011, p. 262). It is not that teachers are incapable of giving adequate information about textbooks they use. Teachers are just different from one another. Besides, they do not think it to be a worthy job, as they have other things to do. Moreover, they often find themselves in situations when they do not make decisions as for choosing a textbook for their classes, but consent to use what their school authorities provide for them. They often silently vote for or against a textbook, at least in Ukraine, by using or not using it. So, one cannot possibly collect and analyze all details and memories of different teachers through individual interviews or questionnaires, even in relation to one textbook.

Another reason for not including others in this study as active characters is that the very nature of teacher-textbook relation is quite personal and subjective. Every teaching and learning situation is unique, and every class is unique. This means that no class can be repeated with the same level of accuracy to provide evidence for or against any experiential pattern, especially when it comes to using textbooks. The multiplicity of situations, circumstances, reasons, and factors for using, adding, adapting, changing, replacing, omitting parts of a textbook (Grant,

1987; Harmer, 1998; Maley, 2011; McDonough & Shaw, 2003; Richards, 2005; Thornbury,

2013) are so many that involving others could be a problem rather than solution for such a study.

Even when we observe students of the same age group and proficiency level in the same

45 educational, social and political milieu, it is highly debatable that traditional methods of research will provide accurate and reliable account of what the teacher-textbook relationship is like. The results may depend on this very unrepeatable and unpredictable nature of any class, due to the variety of emotions, stories, moods, and other multiple factors, which students and teachers bring to every lesson. Besides, different teachers profess different teaching philosophies, and those are not always based on books on how to teach English but rather on experience, method of trial and error, and on personal level of engagement with the job. Hence, a classroom seems to be the place where many theoretical constructs fall apart, and new practices and theories may develop because of the uniqueness of every single classroom experience.

Besides, different teachers will use the same textbook(s) differently due to various factors. These include teachers’ theoretical and methodological background, their level of language proficiency, their teaching skills or teacher literacy, their previous experience of dealing with textbook(s) as students and as teachers, their experience of being a reader (or a non- reader!), their personalities and many other factors. There can be certain patterns in the way they would use this or that textbook, but similarities may mainly happen, if teachers stick faithfully to the textbook, as many booksellers suggest. However, if they do not make a textbook their central and the only tool, focused experience and reflective insight is much better when we study teacher-textbook relationship, than even detailed questionnaires. It is the case, when numbers, tables, questionnaires, or interviews do not reflect reality in education, but stories do.

Teachers and learners may regard textbooks differently, and their views may be radically opposite. Every teaching and learning situation and environment are different from school to school and from class to class. It is here, that a personal story of change can show how teachers’ beliefs in certain teaching methods their actions are often based on (false) assumptions. A story

46 can describe how teacher’s linguistic limitations or the limits of power shape the ways materials and textbooks are used. A story can expose how one can revise and reinterpret those assumptions and, in favorable circumstances, independently develop new concepts of a textbook underpinning those new assumptions. Autoethnographic approach gives way to subjectivity in the area where subjectivity is one method to create new meanings while linking the educational, the social and the political (see Denzin, 2013; Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011; Jones, 2005).

This study is about textbooks for teaching and learning English as a foreign language used in a school in Ukraine and their impact on a teacher working in different historical, social and political environments. The research question – How does teacher-textbook relationship transform over time due to professional, social and political changes? – is experience-based. As the question draws on my student, teacher, writer and textbook promoter experience, the research becomes “self-consciously value-centered rather than pretending to be value free” (Ellis et al.,

2011, p. 274). This research project does not celebrate objectivity in a sense of taking an objective outsider’s view on the problem. On the contrary, it is only through personal engagement with the topic, with the questions and with interpretations and meanings that I can build on the personal experience no outside objective researcher can have. By exploring the autoethnographic side of the project, I have no intention of imposing my opinions or findings on the reader, but rather invite them to participate in a broader conversation about their experiences and stories of using, adapting or replacing textbooks and creating their own materials for immediate classroom use.

That is why I leave out Others and focus on my stories, feelings, assumptions, disappointments, findings and the urge to move forward. As I am making my experience central for my research and because I want to make my study focused, I am using my self as a central

47 character and an object of this autoethnographic research.

With myself being a subject and object in my research, the question of ethics still has to be addressed as I will include reminiscences, vignettes, parts of conversations, etc., which presupposes the presence of others in my stories. As St. Pierre (2005) maintains, “Each writing story offers its writer an opportunity for making a situated and pragmatic ethical decision about whether (emphasis added) and where to publish the story” (Richardson & St. Pierre, p. 966). It means that any decision that I make while writing is to be made with respect to the worlds outside of my own and the worlds that are different from mine. It also means that whenever I sound out someone else’s words, opinions or ideas or isolate the voices of others from my own voice, I refer to them as Students, Teachers, Colleagues, Administrators, Policy Makers,

Publishers, Editors, etc. and change their “identifying characteristics” (Richardson & St. Pierre,

2005, p. 966) without specifying their real names or positions. I do that because in the course of all these years that I spent teaching English as a foreign language, I have had hundreds of students and colleagues, I have seen high places in education occupied by different people and by no means will I intend to expose them. I am not criticizing or evaluating their beliefs, decisions or actions. It is my beliefs, values, decisions and actions that are exposed by this research. It is my self that will become vulnerable to critique in the course of this autoethnographic research. Besides, I am not writing about my relationships with people – students, colleagues, administrators, publishers – but about my relationship with textbooks whose authors practically expose themselves by having their works published, and I do not see any ethical problems while referring to their books as educational tools. There is only one person in my research who is exposed, and it is myself. As Dauphinee (2010) writes, “rather than some self-indulgent attempt to insulate oneself from critique, autoethnography must instead open the

48 self to that critique” (p. 810).

Others in my research are not shown as concrete people or agents but rather collective images of those, bearers of ideas that I accepted or rejected when I encountered them. “The text here is used as an agent of self-understanding (emphasis added) and ethical discussion” (Ellis &

Bochner, 2000, p. 748).

I also understand that by this work I do not give answers to all questions. This research is definitely about starting a discussion related to teacher-textbook relationship or rather giving it a new turn. Although this study may address some issues with thorough understanding and expertise, others may remain only partially examined.

As Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) write,

a postmodernist position does allow us to know “something” without claiming to know

everything. Having a partial, local, and historical knowledge is still knowing. In some

ways, “knowing” is easier, because postmodernism recognizes the situational limitations

of the knower… Qualitative writers can eschew the questionable metanarrative of

scientific objectivity and still have plenty to say as situated speakers, subjectivities

engaged in knowing/telling about the world as they perceive it. (p. 961)

With autoethnographic research, one of the most difficult part is to stick to the research questions and not to go off track thus making the research superficial or too general. That is what outlining limitations is for, stating what my research is, and what it is not. I will limit my research to school textbooks of English as a foreign language, which were used in Ukraine in

Soviet and post-Soviet times, after Ukraine got its independence. These will be textbooks for schools with extensive learning of English, the textbooks, which I encountered during my teaching career. However, whereas I may refer to teaching English as an international language

49 or developing intercultural communication competence, such issues are not of primary importance for the research. Nor is it about producing or contributing to any checklists or recommendations for developing teaching materials or resources. Nor will it explore the issue of balance between language and content though certain references will be made in the process. The question of identity formation will be discussed in the course of the study, but it will not be given any in-depth analysis. These are some of the topics I previously thought of in connection with my research, but eventually I decided not to focus on them. It does not mean that I may not change anything in my study, but I would want to adhere to the primary research questions of understanding the relationship between a working teacher and the textbooks they use.

As far as data is concerned, autoethnography draws mainly on personal memory. In

Autoethnography as Method Chang (2008) writes, “Personal memory is a building block of autoethnography” (p. 71), and so personal memory is acknowledged as “primary source of information” (p. 71) in the research. She adds, “Despite its precariousness, personal memory taps into the wealth of information on self. What is extracted through memory can be written down as textual data” (p. 72). Still, while giving detailed descriptions of my experience of dealing with different textbooks, I will also derive from other sources to understand the nature of those relationships and to “connect the personal to the cultural” (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p. 733).

In this research project, I will explore the trajectory of relations of a teacher of English as a foreign language with instructional materials in a Ukrainian school for over thirty years. I will study the teacher-textbook relationship throughout several periods in the history of education in

Ukraine, which can be defined as

1) Soviet period (up to the 1990s);

2) first post-Soviet years of maintaining the standards of teaching English as a foreign

50 language and searching to formulate its own educational policy in the area of language teaching and learning (1991 – 2001);

3) the period of transition from old methods of teaching to new ones, and whether the latter have found their ways into newly produced textbooks (2002 – 2010).

Although such division into periods may seem incorrect or superfluous, it will allow me to approach the topic of teaching materials with a certain level of accuracy in classifying them.

Denzin and Lincoln (2005) express similar worries, when they write that such “historical moments are somewhat artificial; they are socially constructed, quasi-historical, and overlapping conventions” (p. 2). However, they continue, “Nevertheless, they permit a “performance” of developing ideas” (p. 2).

While personal memories become my primary data, to investigate the role of textbooks as agents of change (Hutchinson & Torres, 1994) and a teacher’s attitude to them, I will examine the range of different sources related to the problem. These will include in particular:

1) Soviet and Ukrainian government policy-making documents concerning teaching and learning foreign languages in schools;

2) literature on teaching English as a foreign language in schools in the Soviet Union from the 1950s to the early 1990s and that on teaching English in Ukraine in the first years of independence and in the later years of formation of Ukrainian statehood;

3) literature related to language teaching and language as the analysis and interpretation will inevitably use wider social and political context;

4) English textbooks, which were and are in use in Ukrainian schools;

5) my personal lesson plans both textbook-based and non-textbook based, seminar plans, diary entries and notes, self-made published and non-published teaching materials;

6) other artifacts related to my teaching practice.

Most of the textual data can be found these days on the Internet, including samples of school English textbooks from all periods. There are many artifacts in my possession, and they will also be included into the data sets.

I will choose the sources according to their relevance to the topic of the research. Thus, government decrees, Ministry letters and documents should contain reference to the current state of affairs in teaching English as a foreign language in each of the periods mentioned above, the outline of teaching methods, requirements for school textbooks. Academic literature on methods of teaching EFL should reflect a framework of accepted teaching methodology of each of the periods and, if possible, analysis of existing textbooks or/and theoretical background of textbook writing. Such literature will include Soviet, Ukrainian and Western sources. Textbooks for analysis will include a range of recommended or prescribed titles for primary and lower secondary schools– the equivalent of Canadian elementary and junior high schools. Literature describing general English language teaching practices in Ukraine or textbooks in use is scarce, although students’ and other users’ comments on web-forums are plentiful. These may find their way into the research project as long as they refer both to classroom practices and mention textbooks at the same time.

Ellis, Adams and Bochner (2011) refer to an interview with Mitch Allen who says, that

“an autoethnographer must look at experience analytically” (p. 276). They “have a set of theoretical and methodological tools and a research literature to use” (p. 276).

The data will be sorted according to the historical period, and analyzed according to the cultural background, historical context, accepted or prescribed content and teaching methods in schools. The data will be analyzed through the lens of researcher’s interpretations of how

52 teaching trends of each period reflected in English textbooks informed individual teacher practices, and how those practices shaped the teacher-textbook relationships.

Chang (2008) speaks of the following 10 strategies to use while interpreting data:

(1) search for recurring topics, themes, and patterns; (2) look for cultural themes; (3)

identify exceptional occurrences; (4) analyze inclusion and omission; (5) connect the

present with the past; (6) analyze relationships between self and others; (7) compare

yourself with other people’s cases; (8) contextualize broadly; (9) compare with social

science constructs and ideas; and (10) frame with theories. (p. 131)

According to Ellis, Adams and Bochner (2011) autoethnographers “must use personal experience to illustrate facets of cultural experience, and, in so doing, make characteristics of a culture familiar for insiders and outsiders” (p. 276).

First, I will do the content analysis of government documents and focus on the main ideas and guidelines outlined in them. This will include examining and interpreting goals and reasons for the changes in methods of teaching and learning foreign languages in general and English in particular, how those goals were to be achieved, what steps were offered to improve the existing situation, what was said about textbooks as teaching tools.

Then I will study how those directives and guidelines were grounded and interpreted in academic literature of the corresponding period, what recommendations were embodied in existing textbooks for middle secondary schools, how the authors might assume teacher-learner roles, and how their assumptions took shape in the actual classroom.

After the initial study and analysis of the government and literary sources, artifacts and textbooks themselves, I will compare and contrast strengths and weaknesses of the textbooks in focus against pedagogical, educational and ideological inputs and, more importantly, the effect

53 they might have had on both teachers and learners. While recognizing the imperfectness and political or social bias of textbooks of all periods mentioned above, I will draw on my own stories of learning and teaching to disrupt certain opinions and conclusions, both critical and eulogistic, made in literature related to the textbooks used in schools at the time in focus.

To analyze recommended textbooks from different periods, I will use an approach for analyzing teaching materials offered by Littlejohn (2011) and Richards and Rogers (2014). In doing this I will focus mainly on the design aspect, i.e. aims of the course, principles of sequencing teaching material, principles of selection of language areas to be studied, prevailing subject matter and focus of subject matter, types of teaching/learning activities, participation, etc.

I will use the following questions to compare and contrast the teacher-textbook relationship:

How different textbooks influenced teaching practice? How I as a teacher related to the content I had to teach? How teacher(s) worked to repair the mismatch between textbook’s implications and classroom realities? How teachers and learners may reinterpret materials and tasks? How the change of political and social context changed teachers’ perceptions of their work and the role textbooks played in it?

The above questions will prove to be important when I analyze the nature of activities, the implied mode of classroom interaction and participation, the assumed ways of developing students’ skills and characteristics and other aspects of the design constituent of the textbook analysis framework (Littlejohn, 2011). Going on with the examination of a textbook, an analyst – be it a school teacher or a researcher – will inevitably go form “objective description” to

“subjective analysis” and “subjective inference” (see Littlejohn, 2011, p. 185). Whether some are content with Grant’s (1987) suggestions to omit, replace, add and adapt material in the textbooks they use, others may go on to faithfully stick to, completely ignore or even thoughtlessly

54 dismantle one. Teacher-textbook relations have never been linear and by no means universal.

The more subjective the analysis becomes the more delicate tool is needed to interpret and construct meanings however private they might appear.

The purpose of this analysis is to see whether and/or how the theoretical presumptions and computations were reflected in the textbooks; whether the content and design of the textbooks presupposed learning. It may also consider in what ways and how the intentions and realities converged and diverged, what effect this had on real classroom practice, how students and teachers brought in their own interpretations and meanings of what was offered in the existing textbooks. By comparing, contrasting and juxtaposing the data, I will try to create meanings related to cultural understanding of the shifts and drifts in teaching English as a foreign language in Ukraine.

This autoethnographic research will study how the content and teaching methods used in the textbooks of English as a foreign language, EFL curricula, educational policy documents, educational policies themselves, and professional development experiences shaped teacher- textbook relationships within political and organizational boundaries over time. It will provide cultural interpretation to the autobiographical, political, and historical data. Whereas the focus will be on the textbook as pedagogical, educational, and ideological device, this is a story of change, and how teacher identity and teacher literacy become of primary importance, when it comes to practical use of textbooks of any kind in the English classroom.

In the next chapter, I will describe how textbooks shaped teacher practices and how through gaining experience and understanding the inverse process takes place to turn the teacher into an active interpreter of meanings behind textbook subject matter and eventually into a material writer.

Chapter 4

Mind If I Find?

“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way”

Juan Ramón Jiménez

“…you'll still mumble in a corner a crust of truth, to men

And gods disgusting. –You and I, Cassandra.”

Robinson Jeffers, Cassandra

Setting the Scene

Textbooks are everywhere. There seems to be no subject or skill which would not have a corresponding coursebook, manual, handbook, how to guide, leaflet or the like. These should have the aim of making the life of a learner easier and their acquisition of knowledge or skill possible. Students of all ages are provided with or are told to acquire a certain textbook, or textbooks, to help them succeed in their pursuit of knowledge or skill. In an educational setting, textbooks are necessary attributes of teachers and are supposed to help them in their everyday attempts to help (I nearly wrote make!) their students learn. If we think of teaching as of any other job, a textbook is one of the tools teachers should be able to use in their work (West, 1960).

The better the tool, the better the result. The number of people involved in the process of textbook production is amazingly huge, from academic researchers and educational policy makers to curricula developers and authors, from editors and artists to publishers and booksellers. That is why many teachers reasonably assume that with the development of educational research, new technologies, growing professional expertise and publishing experience, their textbooks should be up to date, engaging and easy to teach with. In other words, teachers (as well as general public) expect textbooks to be teaching aids, not obstacles.

In their views on textbooks as teaching tools, teachers of English as a foreign language around the world are no exception. While the debate among native speaker teachers of English on whether to use or not to use textbooks in classrooms goes like a pendulum from one extreme to the other (see, for example, Allwright, 1981; Christenbury & Kelly, 1994; Crawford, 2002;

Freebairn, 2000; Hansen, 2003; Harmer, 1991; Hutchinson & Torres, 1994; Lent, 2012;

Littlejohn, 1992; O’Neill, 1982; Thornbury, 2000; Tomlinson, 2011), the overwhelming majority of non-native speaker teachers of English, who teach English in non-English speaking countries, have to rely on textbooks in their work (see, for example, Llurda, 2006; Orlova, 2014). For many of them textbooks are necessary tools in the process, many of them, both novice and experienced teachers, rely on textbooks to learn what and how to teach (Freebairn, 2000). However, while criticisms of textbooks are many, and while most of the criticisms are grounded and justified,

EFL teachers will be using textbooks, and students will be learning by the book.

It is quite unreasonable to believe that one textbook may be a teacher’s favourite tool for years. In their career, working teachers encounter dozens, if not hundreds, of textbooks, and very often, they make some of them their favourites and label others as irrelevant, boring and bland, and reject them forever. There are different reasons for this, objective and subjective, and it is highly impossible to investigate those reasons in detail, at least in the frames of this study. What seems to be possible to investigate is one teacher’s changing attitude, or relationship, with textbook as a teaching and learning tool.

September 3, 1985. Kharkiv, Ukraine (still the USSR).

As I was going to my first full-scale lesson as a teacher of English, I kept asking myself what was in that job for me, whether I would be able to cope with all those requirements, pressures and challenges, or whether that would be just one of the other jobs I had already tried

57 in my short life. I was twenty-five, and by that time, I had changed quite a few jobs: I had been an assembler, a tower crane driver, a teacher assistant, an artist decorator, to say nothing of being a soldier for two years and doing odd jobs in the meantime. Moreover, I was a student of Foreign

Languages Department of Kharkiv State University. Quite a bunch of experience to start a teaching career! And I was about to teach the language of the countries, which I had never visited, to someone who might not be able to go to one ever; but I still had that vague feeling that what I was about to do was for the benefit of my future students and for my country as well.

At that time, my country was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or more precisely the Soviet Ukraine. Today someone may say that that was an imagined community and that

Ukraine had never been Soviet or Communist completely. In a way, it is true. In a way, the whole Union had never been Soviet or Communist completely with all its prisons, camps and psychiatrist clinics to keep dissidents in. There were our grandparents with their sad and sometimes tragic stories, many of which did not converge with the stories and statements we read in our textbooks or newspapers or heard on the radio, and they often did not agree with what we were taught. We lived in the best country in the world, but it did not match with my grandfather’s remark, “If my father saw, how we’re living now, he’d die again!”

Then, there were stories and novels by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Viktor Nekrasov, songs by Alexander Galich and Yuliy Kim, poems by Boris Slutskiy and Joseph Brodskiy to name but a few. Those were written in Russian and most of them were banned, but they would still find their way to their readers and listeners, many of whom were used to the Aesopian language of even less persecuted fellow countrymen and women including their neighbours and friends. As for Ukrainian dissidents, the names of Vyacheslav Chornovil, Vasyl Stus or Lina

Kostenko were not even familiar to general public even as “enemies of the state”, indirectly

58 proving that, even in this area, the Russification of Ukraine bore “strange fruit” (Meeropol,

1937). In general, it was hard to tell at that time to what extent other republics were “Soviet”, what that word exactly meant, and what it meant to me personally, but one thing was clear: the divergence of the official and personal interpretations of reality was turning more than one generation into life-long skeptics.

One oxymoronic slogan of those times, which sounded even more weird than “plastic glasses”, was “The Soviet means excellent!” What the authors meant to say referred to consumer goods to encourage citizens to buy domestic products. The reverse effect of this particular slogan could be seen in practical actions of consumers, who tried to get imported goods wherever and whenever it was possible and silently ignored domestic ones.

The ideological messages like the one above aimed to make people believe that it was really so: that we had the best lifestyle, the best schools and hospitals, the best way of government, the best economy, the best national hockey team, the best army… One could just add to the list! The problem was that as you grew older and had independent encounters with reality, those myths were quite well shaken, if not dispelled. These were especially the ones about the fraternity of Soviet nations and the countries of the socialist camp, the wisdom of the people in power, who knew better and would lead us all to the bright and wonderful future, the necessity to think of the country before you thought of yourself and your family.

Still there was something in the air, that inspired hope for a better future in the bigger world, and although I was quite skeptical, if not cynical, at that time about phenomena in our local communities, I was somehow optimistic about the prospects of the country in general.

Little did I know.

Anyway, the life around us was changing, and unlike three late General Secretaries of the

Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union the new one, Gorbachev, inspired hope and spoke about the necessity for the country to be open and to establish new type of relationship with the rest of the world. Indeed, there was hope for the first time after so many years that passed after Khrushchev Thaw. New doors for foreign languages in schools seemed to be opening, and I hoped to contribute to my country’s proper place in the world community.

I mentioned Khrushchev Thaw not only because of its political and economic significance for the country, but also because that was a time when teaching foreign languages in the USSR took a fresh turn. The new educational reform aimed to bring school closer to life and presupposed, in particular, extensive foreign language study and establishing the new type of schools, the so-called specialized or special schools, where students would start learning one foreign language from the age of seven, in Grade 1 (see, for example, Kreusler, 1963; Pyzhikov,

2004). It was also significant that for the first time the discussion on the reform was broad and open. The Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR of May 27, 1961, On Improving the

Study of Foreign Languages ruled that “no less than 700 schools with teaching a number of subjects in a foreign language should be opened” (Council of Ministers of the USSR, 1961). It also ruled that foreign languages curricula should be improved, and in three-four years, new textbooks should be published; the focus in the new textbooks should be on developing speaking skills and the skill of translating texts in foreign languages without a dictionary.

However naïve this may sound today, that was indeed a first real attempt to bring teaching and learning foreign languages closer to people and to outline the overall goal of foreign language teaching and learning bringing developing speaking (if not communication) skills to the level of primary importance. The Decree (1961) also marked the line in the production of new type of textbooks and books for reading in foreign languages, which

60 practically boosted the development of this new area of publishing in the Soviet Union.

It is true that after Khrushchev was deposed in 1964, many ideas of the educational reform of 1958 were neglected and forgotten (Pyzhikov, 2004), adding to public skepticism of reforms in the USSR as such, but the trend with new types of specialized schools and the trend for the search of alternative ways of teaching foreign languages remained. It is also worth mentioning that some English textbooks written at that time still stand out among the rest due to certain features, which I will highlight later.

The Schools

In the mid-1980s, at the time when I started my teaching career, English as a foreign language was taught in two main types of schools. There were comprehensive schools and specialized schools, or schools that had “a specialist focus” (Monk, 1990, p. 38). There was not, and still is not, a practice of having separate buildings for primary, secondary and high schools.

Children would start school at the age of 7 and would often finish the same school when they were 16 or 17. Only when families moved, would children change schools. Comprehensive schools were most common. They started teaching English in Grade 5 with four English classes a week, and students would often make certain progress, considering their inquisitiveness typical for this age, and the number of teaching hours. In the following years, however, the number of hours would be reduced to three and later, in Grades 9 and 10, to two classes a week. Alongside with quite demanding curriculum, low student motivation and often incompetent staff and poor- quality textbooks, English as a school subject in the eyes of administration in such schools was as important as homestead works. Specialized, or special (Monk, 1990), English schools made only a small proportion of schools at that time; so, out of almost 140 schools in my city at that time, only six were such schools. One of those happened to be in my neighborhood.

These were different from comprehensive schools. First, there were more teaching hours of English, which was taught from Grade 1, and students were divided into three groups for their

English classes, usually around ten students in one group. There were three English classes a week in Grade 1, and their number increased to five in the secondary school, with more culture related subjects added in high school: English/American Literature, British/American Studies,

Technical Translation. Second, they normally had better teaching staff and, third, they had different textbooks to teach with.

Apart from today's general beliefs, initially these were not schools for the elite

(Litovskaya, 2008), although within such schools there could be division into specialized and non-specialized classes. The division was primarily according to a student’s ability to learn

English at an early age. Although it sounds strange and unfair today, it was rather acceptable and understandable at that time, as we learnt and later taught English in a non-English environment.

It was similar to streaming in US schools at approximately the same time and had little to do with social inequality. Besides, many parents did not see any practical need for their children to learn English! In their opinion, that was an unnecessary burden with no link to real life. As for the non-English environment, teachers and especially students had very little, if any at all, exposure to the language outside the classroom, and depending on a teacher’s ways of teaching they often had very little of it in the class. However, it would be an exaggeration to say that in specialized classes all students were able, motivated and diligent. They were real children with the whole bunch of backgrounds, interests and problems, and learning was often very far from being a priority. I realized that quite well as I was going to enter the world of education once again.

Did I see myself as a teacher at that time? I would rather say no, than yes. Merely, about

62 a week before that, I just accepted an offer from my ex-teacher, who had become the school principal, to fill a vacancy for an English teacher at the school, which I had left eight years before that as a student and two years before that as a teacher assistant. At least, someone had some trust in me, I would tell myself. I accepted the offer because I started to get bored with what I was doing as an artist decorator, and with the type of relationship that I had at my previous job. Although I was used to working in industry, that was not my circle of interest. I needed a change, and the offer to join the ranks of educators came at the right time, and as Lewis

(1949/2017) wrote, “that pressed the trigger” (p. iv), but how long I was going to remain in those ranks I did not know. My previous work experience did not suggest it would be for too long.

Sometime in the past, before September 1985

Each story begins much earlier than we think it does. This story of my relationship with textbooks I used during my teaching years may find its roots much farther and deeper in time than I can possibly imagine. It definitely did not start on that September day in 1985, when I first entered a classroom as a teacher full of noble thoughts and good intentions, which traditionally pave the road to one hopefully distant place. It had started much before I decided to help my future students to acquire a language that for almost twenty years had been part of my life.

Indeed, I had learnt English at school, and I was learning it at university. English was often part of my activities: reading books in English, listening to and singing songs in English, writing songs and poetry, almost all of which deservedly went to the dustbin later. I would also look back at and browse through university textbooks and my old school textbooks… however strange it might sound!

However, it was not strange. At that time, textbooks had been around for the most part of my life, both at school and at university. They were at my desk at home and on my bookshelves.

They helped me with home assignments, and I often relied on them as on the source of knowledge, not just information, but to be completely honest, before textbooks there were books.

At least, books came before textbooks in my life, thanks to my mother and my grandmother. I did not have many books, but they taught me to treasure those I had. They were books of poetry and stories for kids, that grew in numbers twenty years after the war. I loved listening to my grandmother reading them to me, and with many of the short rhymes, I would learn them by heart and later pretended to be reading, sitting with an open book on my lap. I was about three or four then, and much later it occurred to me that the desire of having a book in your hands is just the first step to enjoying books, enjoying reading and, consequently, enjoying education, not necessarily by reading textbooks.

I did not realize at that time, that it was not always true for my friends and classmates, although I naïvely assumed the opposite. I did not realize at that time that it was not so for my parents. They were just kids when the war began. My mother was only two years old, and they did not leave Kharkiv, when the Germans came. What they went through is quite shocking, as the city was in the midst of severe fighting in 1942 and 1943, liberated by the Soviet Army, recaptured by the Germans and liberated by the Soviets again. When she went to school in 1946, some kids in her class were her age, and some were much older. Books were not number one priority at that time. Food was.

I asked her once why there were no children’s books in our home from their childhood. I would assume they were lost during the war or hard post-war years. She said that she remembered only pre-revolutionary black and white magazines, a big folio by Pushkin, and… her school textbooks. She also told me, how she went one summer to a children’s recreation camp in Odessa and took her geography textbook with her to read. A guide at the camp asked her

64 if she had failed geography at school and had to revise it during the summer. “No,” my mother said, “I just like the book. It’s so interesting!” She was about twelve then. She also said that libraries would make books for children available, but I believe it was a child’s desire to hold a book that would bring them to libraries, and that desire depended a lot on their families.

I realized much later how lucky I was to have books before textbooks, to be introduced to stories before lessons, to pictures before diagrams, to characters before historic figures. The former taught me to regard a printed text differently, as a source of entertainment and information, and not as something meant for school only.

Textbooks come into children’s lives as something new. They mark the transition to a more mature state in life – real school. I remember how I revered my first textbooks. They were different from the books I liked. They were different from the books we had at home. They had some promise in them for me. Take us, befriend us, and we will endow you with gifts very few can receive. They were the promises similar to those that books seemed to offer, and although by that time not all books proved to be that revealing and empowering, I rather tended to believe it than not. The belief was confirmed later, when I saw books, and textbooks as well (!), in the hands of other children, boys and girls, in different circumstances – in pioneer camps, hospitals, on public transport, even in parks. Besides, many of my friends, though definitely not all of them, would often read books and share their opinions on them. It added to my grandmother’s regular reference to books as the media which could help you become a real person. It was she, who urged me to turn the books I read into lifelong friends.

The reverend and pious belief in textbooks as the only source of information and knowledge continued for several years, and as I was quite a sickly child up to the age of twelve, I would often stay at home, and textbooks were the only link with the school, apart from my

65 friends who would visit me occasionally. It was probably then that I got used to reading the same material several times, not to understand it better but because there was not much else to do. I also found out that some textbooks were easier to deal with than others, and that those published earlier often had easier language, although, as I found later, the content was ideologically bound.

I found a big difference between the language of Ancient Greek myths told as stories, which were absorbing and spellbinding, and the language of our textbooks, which from Grade 5 would tell us about class struggle and oppression. I did not certainly call my textbooks “ideologically bound”, nor did I feel repulsive because of the constant mentioning of feudal lords and serfs. My textbooks suddenly became boring, uniform and flat. They told about different events using the same words and stories somehow disappeared from them. There was less and less excitement in them.

1981 – 1983

In a way I was prepared for a teaching career, because a couple of years before that, I worked as a teacher-assistant in the same school. It was not a dream job in terms of salary (and that was why I left later), but it gave me a good understanding of what the work of a teacher was like, and some practical experience. In fact, I would say that it was a one-year long passive teaching practice. For many other students of foreign languages departments, the length of such practice would be one or two months. Moreover, I would sometimes sub for teachers of English who were absent for various reasons, which means that some active involvement in teaching was also there. It was then that I looked at textbooks through different eyes.

Before I tried teaching, as a schoolboy or university student, I gradually learnt to ignore a textbook, or to use it in my own way, to bend it, which, in my opinion, would reflect the general attitude of students towards existing learning materials. The main thing was to get through and I

66 learnt not to rely on one textbook only. To get my assignment done, I could and would get another textbook, or manual, or book, or any other printed resource (there were no digital ones), it did not matter what! What mattered was the completion of the task. So, to cope with essays on

Russian literature, for example, I would not use the textbook which we used in class. First, copying was not allowed when you had to write an essay. Second, I found the existing textbook rather vague in terms of language, and hence incomprehensible and boring. The language of the textbook was academic and “scientific”, which, as I learnt, should distinguish Soviet approaches to education and textbooks from the rest. However, although I was a reader, like many of my friends were, it was hard for me to get through that language even at the age of fifteen or sixteen.

When we read set books, we could understand and enjoy the language of Gogol, Chekhov or

Dostoyevsky, but as long as it came to textbook explanations of how we should understand and interpret the texts, something would get wrong, and the flavor of good reading would quickly disappear.

What did I do to cope with tasks on literature? I was lucky to have found an old textbook on literature, which my mother had used at school, and although it was written in the 1950s and mentioned Stalin on every other page, its language was plain, clear and concise. It was much easier to do any oral or written task, and it saved me enough time to do other school tasks.

Another vivid moment came at university when we had to learn French as a second foreign language. I do not even remember the author of the set textbook. I opened it and closed, and started looking for another one, more understandable and appealing, the one, which would suit my style of learning. I found one, and although French was a language I had never studied before, I managed to get an A, just half a year later during the exam.

I think, it was probably then, when I subconsciously realized how important it was to

67 expound any learning material in plain and clear language. It was even more important in textbooks, which theoretically should be written for a student in the first place, and only then with the teacher in mind.

In other words, as a student I could be flexible in choosing materials for learning, whilst teachers, especially school teachers of English, did not have the luxury of great choice. As a student, I could easily ignore a textbook; as a teacher, I could not. I saw more experienced colleagues use textbooks in their groups, I saw new textbooks delivered to the school, and my assumption was that these new ones should be better that previous ones, otherwise why writing

(or getting) new ones but to improve teaching and learning!

As I was subbing for absent teachers as a teacher-assistant, I would often mention to myself, that English textbooks I had to refer to were far from being interesting, clear and easy to perceive, and that it would not be appealing to myself, if I were a student in that same very class.

Although some texts were stories, the majority of the tasks were mechanical and uniform.

Frankly speaking, at that time it did not bother me much. I was a teacher-assistant, not a real teacher. My responsibility had clear boundaries and limitations, a couple of lessons as a substitute did not make me a teacher! I did not take that form of teaching very close to my heart.

September 1985

This time it was different. I came into the classroom not as a substitute, but as a teacher, and the result of my work completely depended on me, at least, I thought that it did. I started with only twelve teaching hours a week, and my students were from Grades 1 and 2, which means that they were 7 – 8 years old.

The students were there, and they were so small that you could hardly believe it was possible. They would look at you with their naïve, expectant, interested and inquisitive eyes, and

68 they were so open that you could not betray them, even if you did not know what to teach or how to teach. You would have to learn both and to do it fast.

They did not teach you at university how to teach young children. You could consider yourself lucky if you had good teachers at school. At least, you could follow their ways, subconsciously understanding that it was here and now that mattered both for the kids and you.

It turned out that there was no textbook in Grade 1, or rather, there was one. The textbook had two parts. The first contained different pictures without any label or word anywhere in the page. The second part contained short texts, which described the pictures. It seemed strange to me: pictures had no text, texts had no pictures. It was practically impossible to use it with seven- year-olds, and none of the teachers in our school did.

Instead, detailed hand-written calendar plans with different rubrics were our main teaching maps. They contained themes, key vocabulary and grammar patterns students should be able to use, skills to develop, and reference to teaching aids. These turned out to be more practical, in terms of having language areas and linguistic skills in certain accordance. At least, a teacher could see what words, collocations, language chunks, and grammar patterns students should recognize in speech, and which of those they should be able to use. Reading and writing as such were not in the curriculum for Grade 1.

Nevertheless, it was a pleasure to work with these groups. Although it was not easy to get their attention and then keep it, it was a challenge I had never had in any of my previous jobs. On the one hand, I knew how some teachers would maintain discipline in class with strictness and nothing more than strictness. Still I remembered quite well that the desire to learn in such environment was not even there. The emotional constituent was not the one you wanted it to be.

On the other hand, if you do not maintain order, it could result in laxity, which is even worse for

69 learning, as you may not be able to help students learn, if they do not want to. I had often seen the second type of classes with no order or discipline, and consequently no learning. I also knew how students regarded both types of teachers, and that was why I knew it was a challenge.

What relation, you may ask, does it have to textbooks, if we did not have any in Grade 1?

Such question may be relevant, unless we realize how such situations when you do not have any materials contribute to one’s understanding of what to expect from teaching materials in general.

The whole professional atmosphere in the school was filled with the necessity to find reasonable ways to teach and to learn how to make teaching more efficient. How to start a lesson, how to get students’ attention, how to engage them in an activity, how and when to give them (and yourself) time to relax, how to introduce and practice new vocabulary, how to end a class, those were the questions I did not know how to answer at first. What was more important, we often talked about how to ensure that students learnt more or to help them develop positive attitude to learning

English and to learning in general.

Strange as it may seem, I was learning all this while teaching my first seven-year-olds.

First, you had to tune them into the atmosphere of the English language, as they did not have practically any contacts with it outside the classroom. Then you had to revise most of the chunks and vocabulary they had encountered before. I do not use the word learn here, as anyone who tried to teach little kids knows well how quickly they pick up the language and how fast they forget it unless it is revisited. We played language games, we revisited language material again and again, we sang songs and recited rhymes in English, played with flash cards, described pictures, had physical breaks… we did all that, and yet I lacked textbooks. Why? Because any child should learn to love books, as books should not only provide information, but also bring joy to little hearts; because the urge to get a book is the first move towards conscious learning at

70 any age. At the same time, disinclination to open one, reluctance to read and understand lead to inability to communicate with the text as source of information and, what is worse, to the rejection of books and to the rejection of education.

Apart from Grade 1, students in Grade 2 did have a textbook. It was unfamiliar to me, as many years had passed since I was in their shoes and, again, due to my novice teacher’s naivety,

I thought it was better than the one we used as kids. Besides, some of my colleagues would say that when students were in their second year of learning English, it was easier to teach them, because they would learn to read, and it would give you quiet moments during a lesson.

There was a huge difference between students in Grades 1 and those in Grades 2. The older kids already knew what kind of institution a school was, they could behave in class and seem to understand the rules of the game. However, I did not see big difference in terms of their knowledge of English and that of my first graders, as long summer holidays had had their effect on the kids. They just did not remember what they had learnt in the previous year, and we had to start it over again. Another difference was that I had to use a textbook with them, the tool, which could hypothetically make my life easier and more goal oriented.

I will probably spit against the wind, while the whole Russian speaking Internet still showers praise on that textbook, as well as other textbooks by the same group of textbook writers, but I found it biased, boring and student-unfriendly. It might seem to an adult, or a parent, who checks how their child learns the language they did not manage to master, that the textbook was clear and systematic. It is still widely assumed that if you start learning little bits of a language, you will then be able to build phrases and sentences and eventually communicate!

Unfortunately, it is not an untutored opinion, it is expressed by quite a few in academic circles, and I will try to speculate about some possible reasons for that.

Different from the Rest of the World

“Experience keeps a dear school…”.

Benjamin Franklin, “Poor Richard’s Almanac”, Dec. 1743.

In the Soviet Union, the ideas of how to teach foreign languages were mainly based on pre-revolutionary (1917) experiences and practices, ideas developed in the isolation from the rest of the world, and post-revolutionary propaganda-based stories about party leaders’ abilities to learn and use foreign languages. Future developments mentioned those practices one way or another.

The pre-revolutionary practices included learning Greek and Latin and one or two foreign languages in classical gymnasia and learning two foreign languages in real-gymnasia. The main stress was on graduates’ ability to read, write and translate, which in practice meant learning grammar first and then reading literature (see Kreusler, 1963). Concurrently, there still existed the practice of hiring a foreigner as a private tutor for children in wealthy families. It may mean that even at that time there was an obvious fault between knowing a foreign language, as offered by formal education, and using a foreign language, which was an individual decision and enterprise.

The necessity of learning a foreign language was also endorsed by stories of how people like Karl Marx, Lenin or Stalin learnt foreign languages. So, for example, in the very first lesson in Grade 2, the teacher’s book (Vereshchagina, Dubrovin, & Pritykina, 1982b) quite seriously offered a teacher to make the following introduction:

[Step] 2. The teacher leads the students to think of the necessity of learning foreign

languages. One can tell about how K. Marx, F. Engels, V.I. Lenin and other outstanding

leaders of the Communist movement learnt foreign languages and used them in their

practical activities. (p. 31)

The phrase “and other outstanding leaders of the Communist movement” is rather vague, and no specific names are mentioned. The thing is that in the course of the history of the Soviet state, many party leaders were doomed to fall in and out of political fashion, often labeled as

“enemies of the state” or just assassinated or imprisoned and forgotten, and the most frequent examples to refer to were Lenin and Stalin. The latter himself stopped to be mentioned by the

Soviet press from the mid-1950s, and Lenin remained the only valid foreign language learner example. Those stories, many of which were invented and embellished, can also provide some evidence of why Soviet methodology placed such great emphasis on conscious, systematic and

“serious” methods of language learning.

That was what Lenin wrote to his sister Maria from Munich, Germany:

As for intellectual work, I would especially recommend translations and, moreover,

reversed (author's italics) ones, that is, first from the foreign language into Russian in

writing, and then from the Russian translation again into the foreign language. I learned

from my experience that this is the most rational way of learning the language (emphasis

added). (Lenin, 1975, p. 208)

This was the most frequently cited excerpt which was to justify the prevalence of grammar and translation in foreign language teaching and learning, although Lenin also mentioned other ways and methods of learning:

“Toussaint is excellent. I did not believe in this system before, but now I became

convinced that this is the only serious, efficient system (emphasis added). And if, after

going through the first issue of Toussaint, you take a couple or two lessons from a natural

foreigner, then one can learn absolutely well. (Lenin, 1975, p. 226)

Here, Lenin most likely wrote about the Toussaint-Langenscheidt method of learning a foreign language, which was quite popular at that time both in Europe and North America.

Besides, the first letter (No 128) is dated May19, 1901, when Lenin was still in Munich. The second (No 144) is dated December 17, 1902, and was written in London, where Lenin and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, arrived the same year in April. In his London letters to his mother and sister Lenin wrote a lot about his success in learning English. In other words, although the

Toussaint-Langenscheidt method also involved translation, it took Lenin a year and a half to completely change his views on learning a foreign language going from “the most rational way of learning the language” to “the only serious, efficient system”. However, the official science kept silent about such shifts in Lenin’s mind, and it also did not talk much about other obvious things. For instance, Nadezhda Krupskaya wrote:

“…when we arrived in London (…), we did not understand anyone, and nobody could understand us. And we had to learn anew” (Krupskaya, 2014, p. 580).

This is not surprising for anyone who tried to learn any foreign language when isolated from its culture, using analytical methods of learning grammar and trying to translate without having any opportunity to use the language in real-life situations, but it was unacceptable to reveal such details about the role model for all children in the Soviet Union.

Moreover, Lenin’s case was typical in many ways not only for his time, but for later years as well! That is how it appears to happen. A young man learns classical and modern foreign languages at gymnasia (i.e. high school) and finishes it with excellence. He might not need any of those languages for some time, as he is engaged in different (revolutionary or any other fancy rebellious) activities. He revises some of the languages (or started to learn new ones the way he had been taught, i.e. by studying grammar and translating texts without any exposure

74 to the variety of meanings and to real communication), goes abroad and realizes that almost all of his efforts to study the language were in vain. He starts to relearn the language within the new culture and eventually succeeds to some extent. Quite typical for many of us!

Besides, it is claimed, that Lenin was an excellent student at gymnasia where he learnt

Latin, Greek, French and German. Regardless of how they were taught that was a solid foundation for future learning. He also seemed to possess certain characteristics that distinguish him from other learners of a foreign language: persistence, diligence, self-discipline, to name a few. These characteristics were praised by his official biographers and eventually by educators in the Soviet Union and were set examples of the only possible approach to learning as such and to learning languages in particular. There are other opinions as for Lenin’s abilities and characteristics, but it was the officially accepted version that tilted the debate on how languages should be taught and learnt in favor of analytical studying of form and text.

Another authority whose ideas on teaching and learning foreign languages were used in the Soviet methodological school was Lev Shcherba, a Russian linguist and lexicographer.

Compared to his main works in linguistics and phonology, his works on methodology of teaching and learning foreign languages are “relatively modest” (Rakhmanov in Shcherba, 1974, p. 4). Apart from some short articles on the importance of foreign languages in the life of people, he had one brochure How foreign languages should be learnt (1929) and an unfinished first part of the book Teaching foreign languages in secondary school: General questions on methodology published posthumously in 1947. In the introduction to the first brochure, Shcherba wrote:

Everything which is said here relates exclusively to learning foreign languages by adults.

Certainly, a lot will be partly concerning [teaching in] schools. However, at school

foreign languages do not only have practical significance but educational as well. Due to

this, all foreign language teaching in schools should be built on different grounds.

(Shcherba, 1929, p. 25)

Those “grounds” were referred to in the other book. In it Shcherba (1947/1974) criticized the “prejudice that one can learn to read books in any language only if one knows it practically, i.e. in the way they master the vernacular” (Shcherba, 1947/1974, p. 103). Then he wrote about developing learners’ ability to read in a foreign language, and about the importance of reading in the development of learners’ ability to speak. He claimed that with the current insufficient number of teaching hours in schools, foreign language teachers would not be able to teach conversational language because they just could not do it for different reasons, and the only way for learners to acquire the necessary vocabulary was to consciously read and analyze texts. Such texts should be carefully selected by educators, students had to keep vocabulary books, to do a lot of home reading, to understand word building, etc. (Shcherba, 1947/1974). In fact, Shcherba wrote about the things, which probably seemed to him the fast track to mastering a language in the late 1930s, but there were others, which his followers in the area of methodology were not willing not see.

First, the book was not finished, and we know but a few cases when a writer would later rewrite and restate certain ideas to make them more precise and concrete. Second, Shcherba did write about starting to learn a foreign language with acquiring language material and chunks

(although he does not use the terminology) and acquire grammar areas and reading skills gradually (see Shcherba, 1947/1974, p. 101). He gave the detailed description of ways to teach analytical reading later, but who knows what emphasis he could have put on the first stage of language learning, had he finished the book. The chapter on methodology is the last one in the book and possibly the least reviewed and edited. Thirdly, the first paper was written in 1929,

76 when the majority of the population was still practically illiterate, i.e. they could not read or write in their first language. It is not surprising that teaching literacy in this sense, teaching people to read, was the first important task for educators at that time and was regarded as synonymous to learning. One way or another, Shcherba’s great and deserved authority gave a huge argument to proponents of analytical methods of studying a foreign language. He himself could not argue or comment on any interpretations of his words and ideas made by his followers.

The following examples may help us to understand the adherence to analytical methods of foreign language learning in later years, as this adherence, first, was based on authority, and, second, was interpreted to the benefit of the proponents of analytical methods of learning.

The first example is to show the relativeness of authority of thought and knowledge. It is set in Ancient Greece. When Democritus, who formulated ideas about the atomic structure of the universe died, Aristotle was around fifteen years old. Nevertheless, it was he who vigorously opposed the idea of atoms and refuted it with his logic and authority. Democritus could not defend his ideas because he was dead. As a result, the idea of the atom faded into oblivion and was only scientifically revived in the eighteenth century.

The second example is to show the shortcomings and even dangers of misinterpretation of the words of others, or even deliberate misuse of those. Orwell (1968) commented on Marx’s words “religion is the opium of the people”, saying that it was

…wrenched out of its context and given a meaning subtly but appreciably different from

the one he gave it. Marx did not say… that religion is merely a dope handed out from

above; he said that it is something the people created for themselves to supply a need that

he recognised to be a real one. “Religion is the sigh of the soul in a soulless world.

Religion is the opium of the people.” What is he saying except that man does not live by

bread alone, that hatred is not enough, that a world worth living in cannot be founded on

realism and machine-guns? If he had foreseen how great his intellectual influence would

be, perhaps he would have said it more often and more loudly. (Orwell, 1968, p.18)

Moreover, if we consider that opium was not considered a dope but a soothing drug at the time when Marx said that, the saying becomes the opposite of the meaning the Bolsheviks and other freedom fighters imposed on it when justifying their robberies and ruining of churches and making the people of the Russian Empire denounce the faith of their forefathers.

These two examples (and there can be much more) explain why and how some good and sane ideas can lead to big blunders and failures in different areas of social and scientific life. It happens when interpreters of such ideas are unwilling to admit that they can be in the wrong or when they use the authority of others to twist the original meanings of the ideas which they refer to, or when they do it to their own benefit.

We will never know how Shcherba, who actually formulated the far-going policy of the

Soviet methodology, would react to or comment on the further developments of his ideas, but it was his ideas that were developed by Rakhmanov and his colleagues from foreign languages department of Moscow Pedagogical Institute. They highlighted some of his ideas, discarded others, gave it all the appealing name of conscious-comparative method of teaching foreign languages – and who does not like to be called conscious! – and it became the officially accepted method of teaching any foreign language in the Soviet Union (Kreusler, 1963).

The main emphasis was on “grammar, translation, and comparison of the foreign language with the vernacular. Analytic reading, that is, philologic dissection of a text with a search for forms, became the core of this method” (Kreusler, 1963, p. 12). Once it was accepted officially, described as scientific, systematic and comprehensive, it became practically

78 impossible and even dangerous to challenge or criticize it: “The works by I. V. Stalin on the question of linguistics confirm the correctness of the application of the principle of consciousness” (Konstantinov, 1952, p. 3).

The Lost Opportunity

There was an attempt to revise the approach after Stalin’s death, when numerous publications on unsatisfactory state of matters in the area of teaching foreign languages appeared in pedagogical press (Kreusler, 1963). The debate was initiated by Prof. Zvegintsev from the department of theoretical and applied linguistics of Moscow State University, and supported by

Prof. Anichkov from Leningrad, and later by many others (see Kreusler, 1963). They argued that the neglect of the findings of the Western school of linguistics and the wrong interpretation of

Shcherba’s (1929, 1947/1974) ideas led to a method which was based on pseudo-scientific assumptions and inappropriate for teaching and learning foreign languages (Anichkov, 1957;

Zvegintsev, 1954). The proponents of traditional conscious-comparative method were Prof.

Rakhmanov’s group from Moscow Pedagogical Institute and the group from the Sector of methodology of teaching foreign languages of Institute of Methods of Teaching at the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR also headed by Prof. Rakhmanov. The debate was often hot and involved both opponents and proponents of the conscious-comparative method, to which

Rakhmanov (1952, 1954a) added the idea of “receptive and productive acquisition of a foreign language” (Rakhmanov, 1952, p. 42). Whereas there is nothing wrong in distinguishing between receptive and productive linguistic skills and different ways of teaching those, the theory of receptive and productive acquisition was not explained properly even by its developers (see, for example, Chernysheva, 1954; Gorelov & Nedyalkov, 1957; Matusova, 1954).

The debate is also of great interest to this research in that it raised a question of the

79 mismatch between the declared methodological approach and the existing – or rather non- existing – textbooks of English, which would be based on that approach. Indeed, as Rakhmanov and his followers talked about the necessity of developing different types of exercises for different types of language acquisition (Rakhmanov, 1952), nothing was done to show how productive acquisition of a language was different from its receptive acquisition.

During the debate, Tsetlin (1954), despite being an advocate of Rakhmanov’s ideas, said that the current difficulties in teaching foreign languages are explained by the fact that those principles are not reflected in the existing textbooks, and a teacher can become a good one only if they constantly adapt and repair the textbooks, which very few teachers can do.

Decades later, her words would be repeated by Freebairn (2000), a successful EFL coursebook writer, who wrote,

Writing coursebooks is a full-time job in the way that teaching is a full-time job. It is

almost impossible to combine writing with a full teaching role (emphasis added) – as

many budding authors have found. To some extent, it is true to claim that authors are out

of touch with the demands of day-to-day teaching. (p. 4)

If we add these words to Tsetlin’s (1954) that “not all teachers are capable to stand such workload (p. 103)”, i.e. of producing proper teaching materials, it may only mean that such ideas have always been articulated as far as teaching methods are concerned.

Matusova (1954) stated:

The first condition for evaluating the method (...) is writing a teaching manual which

would give the possibility to teach according to this method. However, at present, such a

manual does not exist neither for schools nor for colleges. (p. 113)

The most interesting comment was made by Chernysheva (1954), the deputy head of

80 foreign languages department of Academy of Social Studies at the Central Committee of the

Communist party of the Soviet Union. After providing constructive and strong criticism of

Rakhmanov’s methods, she concluded: “The development of methods of teaching a foreign language should be done through practical work at a school or college by people who work in the field. Otherwise, it will result in empty abstract bookish scheme” (p. 113). In other words, it meant that teaching methods should originate in classrooms, not in the high academic places.

However, the discussion was ended in a typical Soviet way: the criticism was officially accepted without any tangible outcome: “Something is done here, but it is not enough,” said

Rakhmanov (1954b) during the debate, “One of the most central problems is the development of the theory of the textbook” (p.108).

Ironically, those who failed to clearly articulate principles of cognitive-conscious method of teaching and the ways of active and passive learning foreign languages began to formulate the theory of the textbook in the Soviet Union. It was good on paper, but the work did not result in any tangible product, or any seminal textbook, which would change the situation.

Besides, the long isolation of the Soviet state from the rest of the world, the adherence to traditional ways, or rather free interpretation of those, and the authority of the group from

Moscow Pedagogical Institute (who were Communist party members, while Zvegintsev and

Anichkov were not) led to a certain palliative.

It is sometimes hard to understand which methodological school belonged to which institute or university, but however ironical it may sound, the last laugh in the debate came from

Rakhmanov’s group. Having admitted the necessity to change the approach, the emphasis was given to “practical (emphasis added) mastering of foreign languages” (Council of Ministers of the USSR, 1961), to familiarizing students with the culture of the target foreign language, but

81 still the ideas of conscious acquisition of a language remained almost intact. The name was changed, and the conscious-practical method of learning foreign languages appeared. In 1958, a new curriculum was developed by V.D. Arakin, the new Chair of Foreign Languages

Department of Moscow Pedagogical Institute, and the new old stage in the teaching of foreign languages began.

Brown (2001), describing different methods of language teaching, writes that proponents of cognitive code learning

emphasized a conscious awareness of rules and their applications to second language

learning. It was a reaction to the strictly behavioristic practices of the ALM [audiolingual

method], and ironically, a return to some of the practices of Grammar Translation. . . .

Overt cognitive attention to the rules, paradigms, intricacies, and exceptions of the

language overtaxed the mental reserves of language students. (Brown, 2001, p. 24)

Although Brown (2001) does not write specifically about the views of Soviet educators, that was exactly what happened when it came to classroom teaching. Changing the name did not change the essence of the teaching practices of those who were already used to talking about the language, translating sentences and passages, dissecting and analysing them, making students to learn a lot of unnecessary things by heart.

In 1972, the book Practical Course of English by V.D. Arakin (Ed.) was published, and very soon, with the publication of the other four parts, it was used by foreign languages faculties all over the Soviet Union. It firmly established the dominance of conscious-practical method in universities and indirectly brought it to schools through practices of university graduates who did not know any other way of learning a foreign language. University graduates would bring that understanding and those practices to their secondary school classrooms, because they did not

82 know any other ways of teaching, and the vicious circle of conscious learning would start again, this time in the minds and hearts of schoolchildren.

This part on the debate may seem irrelevant to the topic of changing teacher-textbook relationship, but if we look deeper into the names and relations, we will see that since then, just as it was before, textbooks for schools were developed in Moscow Pedagogical Institute and were based on traditionalist ideas of Rakhmanov’s school. Weiser, Klimentenko, Folomkina

(Rakhmanov’s wife), Vereshchagina and some other recognisable school textbook writers of those days were connected with the foreign language faculty of Moscow Pedagogical Institute.

There were a few outstanding exceptions, which I will refer to later, but old “scientific” traditions were strong. Even in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, the idea of learning to read and learning the target culture before learning to speak in a target language was highly praised by

Vereshchagin and Kostomarov (1990), who described no other way but learning a language through reading, although providing examples of textbooks from the 19th and early 20th centuries

(see Vereshchagin & Kostomarov, 1990, pp. 19-23). However, they indirectly outline one feature of a good textbook, which later would be forgotten or neglected: a story. I will refer to the concept of story in a textbook in later sections.

These days the conscious-practical method of teaching and learning is ascribed mainly to university level, but whereas it might seem acceptable for philological departments of universities, which is doubtful, it proved to be a disaster for schools and for those adults who tried to learn a foreign language for less ambitious purposes.

Besides, any method might seem appealing and sound, until it is tried in real classrooms with real children, with real teachers and with real textbooks, which in this case are supposed to be designed with the method in mind.

Since then, most English textbooks written for schools were based on the same principles of conscious (and long) studying of the target language through learning rules, reading analytically, translating words, sentences, passages and texts and retelling them. Those texts were often written about distant lands and people, whose lives and problems were not resonating with students, the language was simplified, often unreasonably, which resulted in a “different”

English. “We all speak Arakinglish,” that is how I can relate what a younger colleague once said to me at the beginning of the 1990s, meaning that the English language of the university classroom was not real English. That was true.

I remember university teachers of English who would do nothing but making students learn lists of words by heart, translate sentences in grammar exercises and then texts, inculcating a hatred for both reading and learning.

“Why are you not following?” they would say, “I will never let you pass the exam!”

Following someone reading and struggling with the translation was “extremely” engaging, motivating and productive, especially for young adults in their mid-twenties or early thirties who either had done that all before as a home assignment or had read it before in a book form translated in good literary language. For me, it was anything but learning a language, something that Smith (1986) describes as “the nonsense industry” (p. 85).

Interestingly, other textbooks were somewhere in the background, but we did not realize they were textbooks. One such example is Kernel Lessons Intermediate (O’Neill, Kingsbury &

Yeadon, 1971), but the only part we were exposed to was the story The man who escaped, which we listened to in our language lab. It is not surprising that all we did with the story was listening to parts, repeating after the tape recorder, retelling what we heard word by word, and sometimes learning texts by heart.

Such teaching approaches were by no means inspirational or encouraging. Later, when I was quite experienced as a teacher, I heard from one of my university teachers that many of her colleagues would unfortunately teach with their finger on the page. I could not but agree and think that such finger point teaching easily found its way into schools and generations of kids learnt a foreign language in no other manner.

Inspiration or Imitation

“If only you knew from what rubbish

Poetry grows, knowing no shame,

Like a yellow dandelion by the fence,

Like burdock and goosefoot…”

Anna Akhmatova, January 21, 1940

Existing textbooks did not offer much variety in terms of approaches. However, there was a significant shift in the 1960s that could change the way learning material was presented in textbooks.

Before the debate on teaching methods in the 1950s, the usual textbook unit, or lesson, would start with a text, which was usually quite long and was followed by several exercises focused on the language.

Here is one example from a textbook for Grade 10 from the mid-1940s (Yegorova &

Strzhalkovskaya, 1946). Lesson 3 (p. 9) begins with a text adapted from Jane Eyre. There is a short biographical note on Charlotte Brontë before the text, but no pre-reading task, not even anything like Read the text. The text is followed by Explanatory notes, which include some translated words and phrases from the text, and these post-reading exercises:

Pronounce.

I. a) State whether spoonful is a noun or an adjective. b) Build a noun from the adjective distant.

II. Give the synonyms to the following words: delight, pair, to commence, to fetch, order, frequently

III. Give the opposites of the following words: gloomy, silent, low, to commence, strong, pale, warm, frequent

IV. Convert the following simple sentences into complex sentences. [The irony is that the

“simple” sentences were not simple, e.g. The superintendent, having taken her seat before a pair of globes placed on the table, commenced giving a lesson in geography.]

V. Write out from the text all the sentences in the past continuous passive tense and translate these sentences into Russian.

VI. Put the verbs in brackets into the proper tense. [The proper tense was the past continuous passive and the sentence would be as follows: While the grammar lesson was being given to the pupils, they sat silent.]

VII. Translate into English.

VIII. Write the questions based on the story.

The second part of the same text was furnished with similar types of tasks and had two more:

X. Write a short outline of the story.

XI. Write a composition about bourgeois schools for the children of the poor. Describe how the children were fed, clothed and treated there (pp. 9- 14).

Such approach to learning a foreign language was totally in line with the ideas of

Shcherba and Rakhmanov and was the embodiment of the conscious-comparative method.

The change (and the challenge) came from a classroom, and the name of the change was

Nataliya Bonk. After graduating from Moscow Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages (not

Rakhmanov’s) in 1945, she worked in a Language School at the Ministry of Foreign Trade. Her students were adults and although they were quite motivated to learn English, they still had difficulties in acquiring the language in the ways offered by the existing methodological school and the corresponding textbooks.

In her 2011 interview to BBC, Nataliya Bonk, one of the three authors of the future textbook blockbuster, said that it all started with the exercises she wrote for her students while preparing for the English classes. When the director of studies asked where she found those exercises, she said she wrote them herself, and so the writing project began. Two other colleagues, Galina Kotiy and Natalya Lukyanova, joined her, and together they wrote a textbook, which for decades determined teaching and learning ways in the Soviet Union. The book was printed in Austria in 1960. This was totally untypical for the Soviet Union, but first, it was the

Ministry of Foreign Trade that was involved, and, second, it was an Austrian Communist Party publishing house. Besides, the first edition was heavily ideologically loaded, and only in 1972, the textbook was revised and got its present scope, sequence, themes and structure.

That was a masterfully arranged and presented bottom-up (see, for example, Goodman,

1970; Nuttall, 1996) practical approach to understanding how English worked and how a reader could make sense of what they read by decoding meanings. It was a huge step forward for all learners of English who did not know any other but “conscious” ways of mastering the language, and it was a great tool for teachers of English who were now able to teach by the book, which provided them with step-by-step tasks and solutions.

It is true that the textbook was not novel in terms of approaches, it was still within the frames of the contemporary ‘conscious-comparative method’ and grammar and translation (no pun intended) were its typical features. However, it unpacked texts and tasks so skillfully that learning English did not seem so frightening an enterprise as it used to be. In a way, it was a perfect reflection of conscious-practical method and it was the product of the late 1950s, the time when traditionalist ways of teaching foreign languages were challenged.

Here is a typical dialogue from Part One (Bonk, Kotiy & Lukyanova, 1961). It had stress symbols as well as arrows showing rising and falling intonation.

DIALOGUE

(to be learnt by heart)

A.: What season do you like best of all?

B.: I like summer. I’m a good swimmer and I like boating.

A.: I think winter is as good as summer. Don’t you like skiing or skating on a clear winter

day?

B.: Yes, but I haven’t got enough time to go skiing and I can’t skate at all.

A.: Are you going for a holiday in the summer this year?

B.: I’m afraid not. I shall be having my holiday in the autumn. I hope it won’t be raining

all the time.

A.: Then you should go to the South. They say autumn is the best season there. There’s

also a loot of fruit there at that time of year. I’m sure you’ll enjoy your holiday in the

autumn. (p. 266)

Dialogues like this were quite frequent, and texts for reading were accompanied not with five to six, but with twenty to thirty-five exercises.

Exercises were plentiful and did not differ much from those in older textbooks in terms of task formulation. There were the same Learn by heart, Read the three forms of the verbs, Put the verbs into the correct form, Put questions to the highlighted words, Answer the questions,

Translate into English, Translate into Russian, etc., but the steps were much smaller and more achievable than in all previous textbooks.

Moreover, the textbook itself did NOT come from the “most scientific” and “correct” pedagogical school. We can assume that the textbook by V.D. Arakin (1972/1996) for universities, which I mentioned above, was written not only to provide university students and teachers with a modern teaching tool, but also to eclipse the popularity of the other textbook and to remove it from universities. Back in 1981, we still used the textbook by Bonk et al. (1961), not

Arakin’s textbook, in our first two years of studies at university.

I have heard of thousands English teachers using the textbook by Bonk et al. (1961) in their private tutoring. I have never heard of anyone who would use the textbook by Arakin

(1972/1996) in the same one-to-one teaching mode.

At the same time, school teachers also saw some changes, at least for some time in the early sixties, when new textbooks were written for schools. Their classroom practices though depended much on their beliefs of how foreign languages should be taught. The majority of teachers were quite unanimous in following the accepted and prescribed ways of teaching foreign languages. However, as Bolitho (2008) writes, “there was a thriving sub-culture of engagement with English, driven by talented and committed teachers” (p. 214). There were those teachers who actually wrote the other way, across the lines, and, despite bland textbooks of approved writers, such teachers were making the difference.

Unsung Heroes

As in any sphere of life, in Soviet education there were those who would not comply with the officially accepted “scientific” dogmas. The 1950s debate on foreign languages teaching showed that there were many specialists, who advocated other priorities in the field. The late

1950s also witnessed the emergence of a new generation of educators who developed the understanding of the need to change the ways of the conscious-comparative method and realized the primacy of oral communication in teaching a foreign language. College and university teachers provided theoretical grounds for the change, while teachers in schools often had their own moments of epiphany.

That is what one teacher told me about what made her prioritize teaching speaking (and actually speaking English!) in an English class:

I was about twenty-five when I went to Artek3 for a summer to work as a Young Pioneer

leader. I got there as a young teacher of English, recommended by the Regional

Committee of the Young Communist League to work with foreign students. The children

in my unit were from the U.S. It was fun working with them, but I also found it hard to

understand what they were often saying. I clearly remember one episode.

We were outside. The kids were playing near the sea when suddenly they started shouting

like mad, “A caterpillar! A caterpillar!” You know how kids can sometimes get

overexcited, when one starts shouting in disgust over some thing, another joins, and in a

few seconds, you have the cacophony of their shrieking voices, “A caterpillar! A

caterpillar!”

I did not know the word! I was not horrified but I could not show to them, that I did not

know the damn word! I rushed to where they were standing with the only possible

3 An international Young Pioneer Camp at the Black Sea in the Crimea

question of factitious surprise, “Where? Where?”

They were pointing their little fingers at something next to the tree that was growing

there, and then I saw the creature. They were not scared anymore. They were laughing at

each other and at me. I laughed with them.

I learnt a lot from those kids. I learnt to communicate with them. I listened to their

stories, simple and naïve, and I learnt. All the grammar rules that I learnt at the institute

became of second, if not third importance. I realized what I needed to change in my

teaching. After that, I stopped teaching from the book.” (Lyudmila, personal

communication, 1987)

While many did teach from the book, there were teachers who later would be called teacher-innovators, and whose lessons would be called non-standard. They would have good rapport with their students, they would have authority but would be approachable at the same time, and their students would be motivated and encouraged to learn, and although those teachers were to teach something really foreign, they managed to instill that love for the language, culture and learning into their students. They had their individual ways of getting students to talk and understand each other, to communicate with them, to draw their attention to works of literature in later years. The best of them knew what their students needed.

Others were proud to have a scientifically grounded system.

That was the word I hated as a teacher and I still do, due to a certain meaning imposed to it. That word in the mouths of many people, who have never tried to teach a group of children or older people, carries connotations of something solid, reliable and unmistakable, a system: “Do everything the textbook tells you to do and you will never get wrong!” or “Make a child sit still and read the textbook, and they will learn the language!” As easy as it could be.

Experts on Systems

“If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing”.

Anatole France

I have to make myself clear. There is nothing wrong with a system. A good system should work well and bring benefits and good results. However, people often tend to call any set of steps, however blunt or inconsistent they may be, a system.

A day in 1989

I remember a day when a parent came to my classroom. He tried to be polite and enquired about his child first, but eventually came up with a rhetorical question, which by that time I would hear quite often. He was just the one who sounded it out. As I avoided giving negative feedback to parents of little children, just some suggestions, I talked about the kid’s level of interest and participation, what we did in class, and after that I suggested the child should read more in the first language to support learning as such, saying that no parent interference was needed at the moment.

“Hmm, it’s interesting,” he said still smiling, “how you’re teaching them… but I just wonder… if you taught… if they learnt five new words each day, then by the end of the year they would know …” he quickly made calculations in his head, “… about five hundred words!” and he looked at me seeking support. His child was in Grade 1, not being the brightest student in the group.

I also tried to be polite. “Well, there may be something in what you’re saying, but you know, languages are not generally learnt like this. Apart from knowing words…” I saw he was not listening, although he was looking at me and smiling politely. He did not even try to

92 understand what I was going to tell him. He was there to express his revolutionary idea and leave in pride.

“You can come to my class any time and see what we do here”, said I. Now, that was risky, as I could not imagine what the outcome could be. Our Director of Studies did invite parents to attend our classes at times, but she would always let the teacher know about the visit.

In that situation, I did not know if she would approve of my suggestion, whether she had time to be there as school regulations required, but I said that and looked him in the eye. “No, no… thank you! I really have to go. There are so many things to do…” and he left, leaving that unpleasant aftertaste of the conversations when your words and ideas were not even needed.

A day in 1996

I already had ten years of experience teaching English, when I won the Teacher of the

Year contest in Kharkiv region. In the following couple of years, I was either on the jury of the contest or just came to support colleagues who took part in it. One of the parts of the contest was presenting a contestant’s way of teaching, based on their experience and teacher philosophy. I got tired of sitting in the auditorium and listening to the contestants’ achievements and went out for a change, and there was that guy in his late fifties or early sixties. It was hard to tell.

He saw me and acted like a magnetic naval mine. He almost had me against the wall and

I could smell trouble. The guy was moderately drunk.

“You teach English?” he asked.

“I do.”

“Look, I created a system of studying English, but no one seems to be interested. It’s just marvellous! All you have to do is to teach several rules, and you’re there.”

“Sounds interesting,” said I and wanted to escape, but he went on.

“Can you imagine? We won’t need any more boring textbooks…” I just had had a co- authored textbook published, and the word textbooks might have brought an interested look on my face for a flick of a second.

“You’re up there,” he said pointing somewhere at the ceiling. “We can make a revolution in teaching English!”

I had never been up there, and, with my attitude to revolutions of any kind and to the people who think they can make the revolution possible when they are drunk, I had a strong desire to say something rude, but instead I asked, “Are you one of the contestants?”

“Yes,” he said. “Are you going to listen?”

“Sure,” said I with relief, as he headed towards the doors for contestants.

I did listen. He did not say a word about his “system”.

A day in the 2000s

The word hit me again much later, when I attended a methodology seminar in one of the towns in Kharkiv region. At that time, I was a Pearson rep in Eastern Ukraine and came as a guest speaker. I had willingly accepted the offer to come and give a talk to teachers on trends in

English language teaching, as I enjoyed that part of my job more than sales. The Program of the seminar also included some other points and a demonstration lesson.

By that time, many English teachers in Kharkiv region had attended numerous seminars at the British Council Resource Centre. They had been to various seminars and workshops organized by international publishers, like Pearson, OUP or McMillan. If you added to this continuous ongoing seminars and conferences of the regional Teacher Training Institute, you could easily believe that teachers of English started to teach using methods other than just learning texts by heart, doing grammar exercises or translating sentences. Many did.

The demonstration lesson was unfortunately poorly prepared and was far from my expectations to see something communicative or at least student-oriented. It was like going back in time with reading and translating a text one by one and reproducing pre-learnt dialogues and more texts. After the lesson, I silently thanked God, because no one asked me to comment on the lesson, as I always had a moral dilemma of what to do in such cases – to tell the truth, or to say what people usually want to hear. However, it was that conversation after the lesson, which literally knocked me off.

“What system are you using?” a colleague asked the demo teacher.

“I use my own system,” the other replied proudly.

I pretended to be minding my own business preparing for my part of the seminar. I did not know what to say.

Back in 1985

The above stories just show how strong this belief in a system was, and no wonder the nostalgic part of the ex-Soviet audience still believe that nothing was better than those English textbooks which claimed to have a “system”. Such experts are many. They all want a system.

Probably, from the point of view of an adult, or a parent who controls how well their children have coped with their homework, a bilingual “systematic” textbook was a convenient tool. Read this, translate that, what does this mean... and if children learnt like adults, if they sat decorously and read diligently, and did what they are told to do, such a textbook might work.

However, the problem is that little children do not learn like some purposeful adults; how they learn is still a mystery (Halliwell, 1997). Second, many adults behave in class as if they were kids: they get distracted, they do not often follow the flow of the lesson, they get tired, they lose concentration, they ask questions unrelated to the theme in focus. The kids in my groups would

95 also lose focus, get tired, and my job was to keep them interested and engaged. They would not sit still and learn from the book, which we had to use.

We had to use the textbook, as there was no alternative to it. In those days, practically all textbooks for all school subjects, apart from textbooks on languages and literatures other than

Russian, were written and published in Moscow. Just one big publishing house for one big country.

At the time when I started teaching, I was not so critical about textbooks we had to use. I believed that those who wrote them knew how to do it, how to engage children in the learning/reading process, and how to help teachers. I believed that a textbook should be a multipurpose tool, which should help teachers in their work, and help students revise and understand the material, which was previously studied. My once immature and naïve thoughts echoed in my head much later, when I read:

“I want coursebooks that are so engaging, inspiring, flexible and effective that I can just teach without much extra work” (Masuhara, 2011, p. 236).

However, this was not the case for many years to come.

I cannot remember exactly how long the period of my total belief in the textbook and trust in its authors lasted. I would definitely share those false assumptions of children learning from the book, just because the book was there, and because, as I thought, academics in Moscow knew better how to teach. I was a novice teacher, and although I was learning fast as for how to organize and conduct lessons and how to establish rapport with students, I did have that kind of trust in the textbook. When things with reading or “working with the book” went wrong, I attributed that to my lack of experience or even poor understanding of how textbooks should work. Indeed, if English teachers in the whole country teach by the textbook, it must be good and

96 reliable; and if I have problems with it, there must be something wrong with me, not with the book! I was so naïve that I would not even stop to think that such respectable authors could produce something that would not work in class. Nonetheless, somewhere in the back of my mind something was telling me that my humble experience and my undeveloped teaching skills had little to do with my poor classroom application of the textbook.

I tried to look at the textbook through the eyes of my little students and understand how they might view and accept this or that task, picture or text. I tried to anticipate what they were supposed to say while dealing with the textbook, how they were going to say that and whether they were ready to produce any language. It often happened that the logic of the textbook did not match my expectations. There was something artificial in the ways the material was presented.

The book (Vereshchagina, Dubrovin, & Pritykina,1982a) began with an Oral introductory course. I did not have anything against that, but in my opinion, such introduction could have started with something that was necessary for future work in class, those language chunks we would use every day with our students, phrases like “Good morning!”, “Hi!”, “Hello!”, “How are you?”, words teachers and students would refer to frequently, other simple commands and requests.

The first double spread had pictures. The first set had four pictures: a boy, a girl, a man and a woman. The second set had pictures of men and women at their jobs. The instructions were in Russian. The first one said, “Exercise 1. Looking at the pictures, do task number 16.” The second one read, “Exercise 2. 1. Pointing at the pictures, name the job. 2. Looking at the pictures, do task number 19” (pp. 3-4).

The book was for children of eight. There were only two children pictured in these first pages. There were no tips on what the mysterious task number 16 or task number 19 should be

97 like, no verbal support, none of the pictures was labeled. I thought of what the authors assumed my students should be doing here, what they should say, i.e. separate words, phrases, simple sentences. There was no clue.

Besides, I thought, the textbook was aimed at the children: if the instructions were in

Russian for a reason, they could be for… whom? Students, teachers, or parents? None of the options made much sense. How were children of eight supposed to refer to the picture of a welder in the center? What word were they supposed to use while naming the job? Or where would they find task number 19?

The answer was at the end of the Teacher’s Book (Vereshchagina et al., 1982b). The

Appendix contained the scripts of the tasks, which students had to listen to and repeat.

The following spreads contained similar pictures with similar tasks, and not a single word in English. Then came the alphabet followed by units meant for developing reading skills.

The anticipated relief did not arrive with the beginning of reading in class, as it was not easy for me to find the place for the textbook in the frames of the lesson without disrupting its flow. In our school, teachers would admit that the main skill for students to develop was speaking; and best classroom practice was to take students through certain activities and games to situations, where main speaking activities would happen. I learnt to make that happen, but the textbook would not just fit in that framework.

The theme of Unit 1 was obviously “Animals”, which was a good one for the kids, and they already could name some animals, say which were domestic and which were wild, and one would expect to have some of familiar words or structures in tasks for reading. Instead, there were words, which would fall into the so-called reading rules task. Homework section

(Vereshchagina et al., 1982a, p. 15) merely duplicated what was to be done in class:

HOMEWORK

1) Task 88. (Again! Another mysterious task!)

2) I: guess what animal the artist wanted to show in the pictures, and say whether it is domestic or wild.

3) II.

4) III.

The footnote said, “You should be able to write the words in the box” (p. 15).

“If that was homework, what should we do in class?” I asked myself.

Of course, the students knew the words, and they certainly knew the meanings of the words, but that was not the kind of reading, which I would expect from the textbook for children.

There had to be something behind the approach, I thought, as many novice teachers would.

However, I had a strange feeling that something was going wrong, that it was not the kind of reading I imagined, that the children did not get much pleasure form what they did, and even if they did, probably their pleasure was a mixture of their desire to please the teacher and the realization that they can read English! For me, this activity was not actual reading, as the students were reading separate words or groups of words without relating them to any situation or story. One would think, according to the conscious approach to language teaching, that students would be able to read new words and learn them.

The writing tasks were also about copying or filling in separate words or collocations, which made it a meaningless activity just to develop the handwriting: “a big pig, a little kitten, six little kittens” (Vereshchagina et al., 1982a, p. 15). I assumed at that time that writing should comprise more than that. Many of my colleagues practiced word dictations, and I willingly but thoughtlessly followed in their footsteps. I have hated dictations in the primary English

99 classroom since then, as it turned out to be the longest, the most boring and the most demotivating activity I had ever tried before. It might have seemed easy for teachers who assumed that their students should learn and remember words as far as they learnt them, but the very nature of such dictations could not make them more meaningful or useful. Many kids would continuously write ‘teik’ instead of ‘take’ and ‘hend’ instead of ‘hand’, and would be OK, if they were writing anything but separate words, but I found those dictations were discouraging and demotivating and stopped using them.

Later, I stopped paying too much attention to how they spelt and focused more on what they wrote. I also remember how I tried to make my own son have it right. He would stubbornly write the word have with a ‘w’, and after I tried to use all existing and known ways to fix it, including some traditional parental ones, I saw that it only deteriorated my relations with him and I just stopped trying to improve his spelling and even enjoyed his hawe’s each time I saw them. He kept writing the word his way for several years (!) until one day it was gone and replaced with a usual have. This was true about many of those children who were going their own ways in life and for whom our English classes were part of their school life, not a sacred time when they would sit and learn.

I could also see that the students did not comply much with such “conscious” learning.

They wanted games and fun, while we tried to make them sit and learn. They wanted to talk to each other, to communicate, while they were told to shut up and study. The textbook did not add any more fun to learning. My pious attitude towards the textbook got cracked. Indeed, there was more life and fun in “A black cat sat on a mat and ate a fat rat” than in those scientifically grounded exercises.

It is now in the course of this research that I found out how this atomistic approach was

100 born within the same walls of Moscow Pedagogical Institute, and due to the understanding of how things worked in the Soviet Union, it becomes clear why this one-size-fits-all approach easily found its way into schools.

Going back to the idea of books coming before textbooks, I should say that books for children do not often appeal to their consciousness but to their emotions, to their childlike perception of this world. They tell stories and those stories are not always logical or conscious:

Bears went to the hike

A-riding on a bike.

Then came Tom-the-Cat,

Back-to-front he sat.

Spry mosquitoes drifted by

In a big balloon on high.

Lobsters looked like shrimps

On a dog that limps.

Wolves were mounted on a horse.

Lions drove in cars, of course.

Hares in pairs

Crammed in a tram.

Toad rode on a broom…

What a merry bunch!

Gingernuts they munch! (Chukovsky, 1981, p. 3)

Nothing logical, nothing conscious, nothing adult, nothing from the world of “real” studying, but why then have generations of Russian speaking kids enjoyed it for nearly a

101 century? It was absurd, unreal, ludicrous, but it was also child-friendly, convincing, and alive!

The textbook was not.

I tried to probe into my textbook problem by talking to colleagues, but the most common reply was, “Well, it’s not perfect, true, but at least we have something to teach with”. I was not very happy to have “at least something”, and although it was clear that I was not the only one who found the textbook by Vereshchagina et al. (1982a) for Grade 2 hard to teach with, I kept looking for a solution.

Once, when I shared my thoughts with one of my more experienced colleagues, I suddenly heard, “You can’t teach them to read with this textbook!” She said it straightforwardly and categorically and, although I did not like the way it was put, I could not but agree with what she was saying.

“Is there any other with which you can?” I asked.

“Borisov,” she answered, “but we don’t work with it anymore.”

“Why not?” I asked naively.

“It’s outdated. Too old. There are old pens, desks, ink-wells, weird pictures, it’s less

demanding. Now we have this!” she pointed at the new one.

Borisov was one of the authors of that outdated textbook, which I remembered as soon as she mentioned it. I remembered the cover, the layout, the pages, the pictures, and I also remembered that even at that time, when I was in the primary school, the textbook did not seem to be that challenging or hard. It could have been my longing to old books that made me start looking for that outdated textbook.

It turned out to be not that easy. Due to the long existing practice of gathering waste paper, or Makulatur, for recycling and making it into a sort of competition among

102 schoolchildren, and later by adults as well, old newspapers, brochures, magazines, journals, not to mention old textbooks, steadily disappeared from people’s lives. Many of those, like The

Agitator or The Communist with the circulation around 1,000,000 copies each, deserved to go there. However, some sharp tongues would spread rumours that by doing this the authorities withdrew and eliminated old newspapers and magazines with ex-Party leaders’ pictures, their speeches, directives, and promises, where one could read about eternal friendship with those nations that later became our bitter or mortal enemies. One way or another, to find a twenty-year- old textbook was not an easy undertaking.

One of our English classrooms at the school, Room 28, was called the English

Methodology Room. It had wall units filled with different teaching materials, books for reading, contemporary and older textbooks. However, most of the textbooks were for older students, there were no graded readers for grade 2, and I did not find the textbook I was looking for. My next step was to look at bookcases and shelves in the other seven English rooms in the school. The same result. I started asking my colleagues and one of them said he might have it at home and promised to have a look. In a couple of days, the old and outdated textbook was lying in front of me on my desk.

It was different. In fact, it had very little in common with the one we were using in class.

I did not know much about the notion of approach to teaching English before that, but what I saw in those two books was about different approaches to teaching and learning English. The textbook by Borisov, Berlin and Semerova (1966) did not seem to have any oral introductory course, but the first twenty (!) lessons were about classroom vocabulary and classroom language: simple orders, commands and requests, prepositions of place, questions Where is…? Where are…? I also noticed that first thirty lessons had no writing tasks! You certainly could make

103 students write everything that was on the page, but they were not supposed to write at that level!

So, in a way it did have an introductory course, but that course was about immediate classroom language, and it prepared students to use English in class. When writing tasks started to appear in the textbook, they were mainly about copying.

Just to compare, the actual “new” textbook apart from copying contained writing exercises which asked students to fill in words and grammar forms in sentences, have or has for instance or finish sentences. Someone would protest that there was more “material” in

Vereshchagina et al. (1982a), more “systematic approach”, but the character of the tasks was rather artificial from the point of view of reason and student-friendliness:

He has a rabbit.

He has a little rabbit.

He has a funny little rabbit

He has a funny little rabbit at home. (p. 35)

A reading task preceding the one above focused on separate word reading:

under, we, hand, doctor, yes, home sister, she, no, neck, he, black, funny, nose, cock, left

(p. 35).

The two tasks were totally unrelated.

Besides, reading all those words was indeed not an easy job for children. I also found it unjustifiably long and boring a task! What were students and teachers supposed to do there?

Read the words and learn them? The teacher’s job seemed to be limited to mere class control and nominating students who would be reading the next passage. Use their diligence and consciousness to learn… We knew that was not the only way to learn new vocabulary, and by far one of the least suitable for young learners.

104

Probably, the idea of the authors was to reach students’ automaticity while reading separate words consciously, but it really had a detrimental effect – the loss of motivation, because not all children did that with ease. Of course, the top ones had less difficulty in reading, there are always some kids in a class who would do whatever you tell them. However, the majority were not that diligent and conscious. Not even that. The other kids were just normal kids with average or above average abilities, but they were not afraid to show that what they were doing was uninteresting and boring. Dealing with diverse groups of children learning

English at an early age made me realize that in our teaching (and textbook writing) practice we should NOT have brightest students in mind but focus on those who need more explanation, more attention, and less stress.

As I am writing this, I remember Smith (1986) when he argues that a similar atomistic one-way approach, which treats students as receivers of knowledge and producers of right answers, kills interest in learning as such. He writes:

There is nothing in the real world that is like any of this pedagogical treadmill. Nobody

learns anything, or teaches anything, by being submitted to such a regime of disjointed,

purposeless, repetitive, confusing, and tedious activities. Teachers burn out, pupils fall by

the wayside, and parents and administrators worry about the lack of student "progress" or

interest. (p. 7)

Books like this came into our lives much later, but what quite a few teachers realized at that time was that interest should become the key word, the central word in the process of teaching young children and in their learning. The linguistic part should be as covert as possible.

The existing textbooks did the opposite. They seemed to remove all fun and put serious adult type of learning into its place.

105

To balance the previous statement, I should add that I am not against any serious or conscious type of learning. I still believe that learning things by heart improves memory and linguistic skills as well as many other extra linguistic ones. I still believe that there is nothing wrong in knowing facts or being able to cite works of literature or recognize a work of art or a piece of music. I still believe it is useful to distinguish the views of Thomas Mann from those of

Friedrich Nietzsche, or Dostoyevsky’s from Gorky’s, … I still believe that the lack of knowledge makes you an easy target for manipulation regardless of who could try to manipulate you. In other words, I do believe in conscious acquisition of knowledge. On the other hand, I cannot but agree that young children, and very often older ones as well as adults, need other ways of learning about this world, and educators, especially policy makers, should acknowledge that children can learn in different ways and games are vitally important for them as well as learning to learn things consciously as they grow. However, I still have doubts if game-like activities or group discussions can totally substitute focused learning. Humans need both. Activities need to be both serious and playful, keeping the right balance between focus and relaxation, between having to understand how languages work and having fun with what has been learnt.

I kept studying the textbook by Borisov et al. (1966). It was not only less demanding in the first lessons. It seemed to be building on the language, which students previously studied. It seemed more logical. Moreover, as the material developed, the amount of the language was increasing, and the language itself was presented in situations and not in groups of unrelated bits of language. The situations were very simple, but they were easy to interpret and seemingly easy to use, which was what we wanted from our students! What was also interesting, all instructions for students were in English (!) unlike in the new and supposedly a better textbook. Reading tasks had only those words, which students studied in previous lessons.

106

I remembered myself as a school boy of eight, when after one class I came up to the teacher and tried to “correct” her. I said something like, “Why do we read school like /skuːl/, is it not /stʃuːl/? There’re those letters ch in it! You said they give /tʃ/ sound.” The teacher smiled and said, “No, it’s OK. It’s still school with a /k/”, but she did not explain why, and I felt a bit dissatisfied. Now I know she could not go into that area of borrowed words in the English language, but I found later that even some teachers of English did not realize the reason why ch in some words sound like /k/!

I think this story indirectly shows that due to the textbook, we as pupils could make some elementary conclusions as for the language we were learning, although those conclusions could often be wrong. However, there is the excitement of the wrong guess that contributes to the development of the language as efficiently as the excitement of the right guess.

Coming back to the textbook by Borisov et al. (1966) I also mentioned that there were broader grammar areas.

The book introduced Present continuous and later Present simple. By the way it was contradicting the existing concepts of teaching grammar, where you should start with more simple forms, but introducing Present continuous before Present simple for kids was much better in many ways! It was logically following the verb to be, and the form was much easier that that of Present simple! Much later I used those examples from the textbook to show my teacher trainees how confusing Present simple forms could be to a young child learning English, and how good context can help with that grammar area.

The authors did not hesitate to put different grammar-based tasks in the same lesson, for instance Present Continuous and Imperative Mood. Here, the two grammar areas intertwined rather logically and naturally (Borisov et al., 1966, p. 67):

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3. Read, do and say. (Let your friend do the actions.)

Go to the door. (I am going to the door.)

Open the door. …………………………

Close it. …………………………

Go to the blackboard. …………………………

Write K. …………………………

Look at the blackboard. ……………………….

Clean the blackboard. ………………………….

Besides, the situations and stories were mainly about other children, and when students had to read those short texts, they were reading about other children like themselves, not about someone else’s rabbits, piglets or puppies. Moreover, those stories were short and manageable, and they grew in difficulty gradually without sharp moves or leaps from one language area to another.

There were certainly several obvious drawbacks apart from pictures of ink-wells or old- fashioned desks or clothes. There were patterns like “Has Tom a ball?” or deliberately changed cultural realia, e.g. Little Red-Cap instead of Little Red Riding Hood. However, for a textbook written in the early 1960s the benefits would clearly outweigh the drawbacks.

I liked the book and I liked the approach. Later I found out that many teachers would use that textbook for their private tutoring, which explained why it was so scarce. Much later one conversation added a new unexpected touch to the story about that textbook.

A Day in 2005

Almost twenty years had passed since I looked at that textbook as a novice teacher and came to like it. By that time, I had had twenty years of teaching English as a foreign language,

108 certain experience in teacher training with the British Council in Ukraine, and I had been with

Pearson as a regional rep and teacher trainer for about five years. However, while talking to

English teachers in Ukraine, I tried to refer to what they might know, to how they used to teach, to what their teaching environment was like. I would also challenge some common stereotypes in teaching English as a foreign language in post-Soviet reality quite often.

One of those stereotypes was teaching pronunciation symbols in the primary school with some hope that it would help students to read better, or to read in general. Such skewness was often so contagious and could become suddenly so popular that teachers would transfer what was good for older children or adults to their primary classes. At a certain point, the enthusiasm for teaching transcription in the primary was so high that you would see it almost everywhere. I though it to be not only unnecessary in the primary classroom, but also quite harmful, as little children would have to learn not only new Latin letters representing foreign words but were also made to learn and remember some weird lines, hooks and letter-like symbols, which would represent letters, which they also had to master. I argued that that was an additional burden for little children learning English, and word recognition was a way better strategy at this early stage of learning. Yet another stereotype hampered my way. Many teachers supported by post-Soviet academia would share the idea, that methods of learning English in the Soviet and post-Soviet reality were very different from those practiced in the Western cultures due to specific mentality of our people. That was why they would often prefer traditional atomistic ways to more natural and sensible ones. During my seminars and workshops on reading I would argue that there are other ways of teaching reading in English to children, and they were not about some unique peculiarities of our mentality.

I remembered that the textbook by Borisov et al. (1966) really practiced word recognition

109 and whole word reading and I went for it again. I quickly found the key to my viewpoint there, and I believed it would help me convince my colleagues that there was something else for them in teaching reading than just learning phonetic symbols with their little pupils.

Although the textbook had phonetic symbols in the wordlist at the end of the book, in their word to the teacher, the author(s) clearly stated:

Before reading a text, it is useful to do fast word recognition exercises. The teacher shows

a word on a flash card, and the students have to recognize it and read it. Learning to read

new words should be based on the words which were previously studied. Transcription

plays auxiliary role and is used only partially. (Borisov et al., 1966, p. 193)

It was a kind of hello from quite a distant past, and I believed, that as long as it came from one of Soviet authors and not from Western publishers, one of which I was representing, then it should work and help remove the practice from the primary English classroom. The textbook was also clearly endorsing word recognition and whole word reading!

On that day I delivered a seminar on teaching reading in the frames of a Pearson teacher- training conference in the Crimea. We offered three full days of training and teachers were eager to participate in as many sessions as possible. There were four of us, who delivered seminars and workshops, including one guest speaker. The schedule was dense, and the participants would quickly go from one session to another to catch up with the information flow. When I finished mine, I did not expect anyone to stay behind and discuss the ideas I shared. The discussion part had been scheduled after all the sessions were done.

So, when one teacher came up to me, while everybody else was leaving, I was a bit surprised, as well as flattered. She was older than me, and I secretly thought that she agreed with my ideas on the subject. She thanked me for the session and then said,

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“That textbook you referred to… by Borisov.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “One of my favourite textbooks for little ones”.

“You know, I was his student at Minsk University.”

I could not believe my ears! Then she added,

“You know, he was an exchange scholar at Cambridge University, when he was writing that textbook. He told us about it”.

If I could only talk to her again, I would ask her to tell what she remembered from his stories about writing the textbook. Unfortunately, we all had to go to other workshops, either as trainers or as trainees, and every move was scheduled until everyone was exhausted by the end of the day. I did not talk to her again, but that reference she made could clearly tell me the following. Those textbooks, as Borisov had authored one more for Grade 3, were really standing out of the crowd, and one possible reason for that was that he had learnt other ways of approaching the process of writing textbooks for little schoolchildren. The ways that were not exclusively Soviet, scientific or progressive.

Did those who taught with the textbook know about such synthesis of Western and Soviet approaches? I doubt that. However, one thing about the textbook is true. It was teachers’ best friend for many years during their tutoring classes, while at work they had to use different ones. I also used it in my private practice, but I also developed my preferable ways of approaching little children learning English and dealing with the challenge.

Ways Around Textbooks

Senior (2006) justly states, “Language teachers develop their teaching skills on the job”

(p. 148). They develop gradually and familiarize themselves with ups and downs of the profession, including learning to teach with textbooks. She does not write though how exactly

111 textbooks shape our teaching practices, how different philosophies of textbook writers influence the ways teachers teach languages, foreign languages in particular. Freebairn (2000) claims that many novice teachers do “rely on textbooks to do the thinking for them” (p. 3). I tend to agree with both, but I have one remark to share: it all depends on the quality of the textbook in use. I believe that both of them have different textbooks in mind, and different textbooks produce different effects both on teachers and on students.

When Tomlinson (2011) writes, that every teacher is a material writer, it is not totally clear what he means. If he means that teachers prepare materials for their classes regardless of a textbook they are using, then we may call such a teacher a material developer. However, if

Tomlinson means that such materials may be used by other teachers in other classrooms with the same age group of students the way published materials are used, I believe this is an exaggeration. Any thinking teacher can strike gold while preparing an activity or thinking of ways to deal with a certain text or theme in the classroom, but it is quite hard to believe that those materials they prepare may be of use for someone else as they are. I never manage to use someone else’s ideas in my classroom as they were. Frankly speaking, I tried but there was always something that kept me unsatisfied with what I did. I always had to adapt other people’s ideas, as I believe many other teachers would do. The truth is that not only our students are different; we as teachers are also different and that is why you will never ever see two similar classes based on the same page of a textbook, like you will never hear the same interpretation of a musical piece performed by different orchestras and led by different conductors. Besides, the educational value of self-generated materials can be very different.

Many of my colleagues at that time did develop additional exercises and activities to furnish the existing textbooks but they hardly ever used someone else’s handouts. Such

112 additional handouts were no top secret in the school. There was that classroom I already mentioned, where we kept such handouts, alongside rows of textbooks and books for reading.

The handouts were classified by themes and grades, and they proved to be very useful in upper- secondary and high school classes as substitution or addition to the existing textbooks, which provided literary texts, often heavily ideological, few or no exercises to master English grammar, and lists of words to learn, which were often off-list (Nation & Waring, 1997).

In Stupnikov & Shershevskaya (1977), for instance, questions students needed to answer were not about the contents of the text they just read, but mainly about systems of education in

England and in The Soviet Union, e.g. “What do you know about our school system?”

Vocabulary questions were quite straightforward: “What antonyms of the word cheerful do you know?” or “Give a synonymous expression for to be indifferent.” (p. 5)

Other textbooks did not provide any other approach to learning and teaching. They seemed to be coming out of one and the same textbook writing factory and following the same outline and task types, and they seemed to be treating teachers and students as if they were numb parts of educational machine that performed operations suggested by the book.

Practically all teachers in our schools had to teach not only students of a certain age but had to work across grades and use different textbooks around the school year. So, during one day, a teacher might have one class in Grade 1, one in Grade 6, two more in Grade 2 with different groups of children, a class in Grade 10, and a class on English Literature in Grade 9. I may be exaggerating here but such a patchwork of schedule was not at all impossible in those days. Needless to say, in such conditions, teachers, whose English, especially conversational

English, was not always good, relied heavily on textbooks as tools in their work with students.

I also had some high school students right after my primary school pupils, and I should

113 admit that the transition for a teacher was quite keen and sharp. You would go from the class where the kids were eager to participate and learn to the one where students were detached and seemingly bored. The existing textbooks did not help much. They did not provide enough exercises and activities for students to work with the language, or any engaging materials to base some discussion on. The texts in the textbooks were bland and ideologically overloaded.

Here is one example from Starkov and Ostrovskiy’s (1985, pp. 3- 5) English 9.

Unit 1.

§ 1

1. Read the text and say why we celebrate the Day of Knowledge. Discuss with your

classmates how knowledge helps people in their life and why the knowledge of a foreign

language is very useful. Say if you had the lesson of peace on September 1.

National Day of Knowledge

The 1st of September is a national holiday in our country. It is the Day of Knowledge.

In less than seventy years, the Soviet people have gone a long way to a position where

our country now leads the world in many fields of science and technology, in the

development of culture and the arts.

On that day, more than 58 million pupils and students start the academic year.

Knowledge is power; the more man knows, the greater power he has. You get knowledge

at school, and also from books, from magazines, and from radio and TV programmes. If

you have a good knowledge of a school subject it will help you later to learn more

difficult things.

A knowledge of history, for example, helps to understand the past, the present and the

future. If you know your other school subjects well, they will certainly help you in your

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life. You will be able to use your knowledge when you need it in your studies or in your

work. Our industry will have more and more robots, but workers and engineers will still

need knowledge, more and more knowledge.

A knowledge of other languages is very useful, especially if you have to work for your

country in another country or if you must read foreign literature in the original. If you

know the language of a foreign country, you can talk to its people and understand what

they are saying. A knowledge of foreign languages also helps young people of different

countries to develop friendship and understanding.

The Day of Knowledge is marked by schoolchildren and their teachers. Veteran workers,

engineers and scientists come to meet them in classrooms. They tell the young people

about the role of knowledge in building developed socialism and in fighting for peace.

We need knowledge to be active, useful citizens of our country.

[The following words and other words in bold throughout the unit are transcribed and translated.]

knowledge, to lead, science, technology, culture, power, foreign, citizen.

2. Read the article from the Constitution of the USSR and give examples to illustrate it.

Article 45. Citizens of the USSR have the right to education.

In your examples you may use the following:

free, universal, secondary, higher education, correspondence course, evening course,

scholarship, native.

3. Read the article from the Constitution of the USSR, find out the meaning of the new

words. Give examples to illustrate what it says using the words and expressions:

Article 41. Citizens of the USSR have the right to rest and leisure.

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citizen, leisure

In your examples you may use the following:

ensure, establishment, hour, working day (week), paid holidays, weekly days of rest, development, physical culture, tourism

4. Read the text once, say what it is about and give it a heading:

The Young Communist League uses its youthful energy to mobilize young people for a massive March on Washington. In this mobilization youth will link local problems to the march slogan: “For Jobs, Peace and Democracy!”

This march on Washington, says the YCL, is very important. An all-people movement must be organized to bring about unity in the struggle against racism and for peace and jobs.

(Adapted from the Daily World.)

to link, to bring about unity

5. Read the text using the References, look at the map and describe the USA. Write down a plan of your description of the country:

The United States of America.

Part 1.

The USA is situated in the central part of the North American continent. Its western coast is washed by the Pacific Ocean and its eastern coast by the Atlantic Ocean. The area of the USA is over nine million square kilometres. [The two-page encyclopaedic type of text has no follow-up task at all. The final task for the lesson is as follows.]

Read the text of Task 1 (p. 108).

[This text is for home reading. It is adapted from Washington Irving’s The Legend of

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Sleepy Hollow without mentioning the real title of the story. It is titled What Happened to

Crane?, it is three pages long and as bland as previous texts. There is an Answer the questions task after the text. There is not a single exercise on grammar or vocabulary after the story].

Now, as a teacher who had to teach with such a textbook, I had questions mixed with doubts. First, if my students should discuss “how knowledge helps people in their life and why the knowledge of a foreign language is very useful”, at least they need some prompts and examples of what to say about these general and impersonalized ideas. They need a model or some additional tasks which would lead them to speaking. Should they struggle with word choice and word order to try to express their thoughts, or use sentences from the text and pretend to express their ideas in such a way? Do they just repeat those ideas they hear all the time in every other class at the beginning of the school year about how important knowledge is? If this is the first lesson in the textbook, where is revisiting of the language the students definitely did not use during three months of the summer and most surely forgot. What should be the answer to the question whether they had “the lesson of peace on September 1” but “Yes!” or “No!”?

Besides, when preparing any teaching materials for a class, and especially when writing a textbook for the whole country, one should predict, visualize and understand what students should exactly do when they do a task. The following tasks about the articles of the Constitution without actual texts of the articles and no tangible tasks except “Give examples to illustrate what it says using the words and expressions” were rather hard for an adult in their first language, to say nothing of a fifteen-year-old youth who should be able to do it in a foreign language.

Task 4 (p. 5) about the march to Washington – could well be Washington, D.C. – could be done by just asking “What is the text about?” and receiving an answer like, “About a march to

Washington.”, which is technically correct. The heading for the text can be given using the

117 words from the text itself: “Mobilization”, “For Jobs, Peace and Democracy!”, A massive

March”, “Youthful Energy” and the like.

The text on the USA, which is written in dry encyclopaedic language, is not equipped with any task and can only be read and translated. No other form of “engagement” is possible for anyone in the classroom, but you do not have any other option with materials like this. Period.

You do not have any other textbook at hand, and you go on to “have fun” while reading and translating the texts. Can you be sure that they will read the story of schoolmaster Crane at home on their own? Definitely not. You will take it to the following class, pretend to be checking how they did it, find out they did not do anything at home, and start reading and translating it in class.

The vicious circle is closed. At such moments, you have a strong desire to add one more verb to

Grant’s (1987) making-the-most-of-the-textbook list of omit, replace, add and adapt, and the verb is throw away.

It is not about poor workman blaming his tools. It is about tools being so bad, no workman can use them. I could not but remember Bill Bryson (2003) when he writes:

There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make

certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly

interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting.

and adds:

...there is a happy abundance of science writers who pen the most lucid and thrilling prose

(...) but sadly none of them wrote any textbook I ever used. (p. 10)

Textbooks like the one I described above were uninteresting, moralizing and dry. They informed. They taught. They preached. They did not engage. They were useless.

Throwing them away did not solve the problem. I would still need something to teach

118 with. Maybe some ingenious teachers can teach without a textbook. They may even need no other materials at all. I would agree that it is possible. I have heard something about such teachers, but I have not seen one. Maybe they exist, but even if they do, they are in the tiniest minority.

Teachers are humans. They sometimes sleep, eat, go for walks, attend to their own children and relatives. They do not spend all their lives in school buildings. They also manage classes and children, who are often hard to manage. Teachers do need teaching materials, or textbooks.

Textbook writers of the Soviet time – as long as we talk about that time – seemed to have only one type of learner in mind, and that learner would probably be like them in many ways as a learner. Those imagined students were supposed to sit and conscientiously learn by heart and remember what was provided in textbooks, something like this:

A year has twelve months. They are: January, February, March, April, May, June, July,

August, September, October, November, and December. The first month of the year is

January. The last month of the year is December.

January, March, May, July, August, October, and December have thirty-one days. April,

June, September and November have thirty days. February has twenty-eight or twenty-

nine days. (Starkov, Dixon, Rybakov, 1988, p. 158)

This is for students in Grade 4 (!), the texts are of the same level of engagement as the one above, and teaching techniques are very familiar: “14. Read. 15. Read the text and describe the room. 16. Read the text and describe the room” (pp. 158-159).

The authors might believe that children find it extremely interesting to describe rooms with the same level of consistency. If they wanted to do anything else, the textbook writers did

119 not offer them that.

The earlier lessons in the textbook did not offer much variety of tasks either: Read and compare. Read the text and answer the questions. Listen and read. Besides, there was something very familiar:

18. Listen and read:

That is a dress.

That is a green dress.

That is a nice green dress.

This is his exercise-book.

This is his English exercise-book.

This is Nick’s English exercise-book. (Starkov et al., 1988, p. 83)

I have already seen that (Vereschagina et al., 1982), tried that in class with my eight-year- olds, hated it, replaced with other reading activities only to find it again in another textbook for different children of different age with different experience in learning! Did Soviet English textbook writers know about any other methods of teaching English? They did not develop their books from scratch! If they study pedagogy and teaching methods, they should know better than average teachers do! However, instead of providing stories and furnishing those stories with engaging exercises and activities, Soviet textbook writers preferred textbooks with disconnected exercises aimed at forming grammatical literacy in ten-year old children!

It was clear even for me, a young novice teacher, that reading those lines was not only boring, it was useless, as it did not bear any meaning! Not a single thing to enjoy!

Smith (1986) was probably not the first one to express similar ideas. That is what he writes:

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Meaning comes first – the process of understanding written language starts with

understanding entire stories or statements and then goes on to understanding sentences,

words, and finally letters, the reverse of the way most children are expected to learn to

"read" in school” (p. 33).

However, Soviet textbook writers were going atomistic in their desire to make little children learn bits of language instead of language itself, and they seemed to succeed in both making language learning into a monotonous tedious activity and, by doing this, killing children’s natural curiosity for learning something new. Did they take a chance to change anything? Probably, but I think, they did not want to. Who would change something that sells?

The Final Encounter

As in my novice teacher naivety I still believed in the power of textbooks, I went back to

Room 28, the English Methodology Room, where there were some other old textbooks. It turned out that those were somehow better in terms of quality of texts, but they had almost the same types of tasks after them!

Read the following story. [about two pages long]

Answer the following questions. [there were six questions]

Find and read aloud the sentences in the text that show… [3 ideas]

Make up dialogues about each of the pictures in the film-strip How We Celebrated

Mother’s Day [the film-strip was not provided].

Imagine the following situation:

You and your classmates have decided to go on a trip, but you don’t know where to go,

how to get there (by train, by bus, or to walk), whether to camp out (live in tents) or to

live in a house, what to take with you.

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Make up dialogues. [no models]

Read this text to yourself. [half page long]

Homework [the tasks were in Russian]

Rewrite the following sentences. To each of the sentence add yours, which is logically

linked to it.

1. Our family like(s) to spend Sundays in the open air.

2. It took me two hours to return home from the country last Saturday.

3. My uncle enjoys long walks in fine weather.

4. He didn’t see anybody in the room, or in the corridor either.

5. The bags were full of food and very heavy.

6. We were sure he would describe his trip to the North.

Read the text using a dictionary. (Weiser, Folomkina & Klimentenko, 1977, pp. 18 – 21)

To my excitement, some grammar and vocabulary lessons were there, but they were somewhat inconsistent in providing language material and not so easy to follow for a student. So,

Lesson One, which was subtitled “We Review” (!), started with the revision of Present Perfect

Tense, followed by Present Continuous Tense, patterns ask/want/tell somebody to do something and make someone do something. These were followed by a text adapted from Pride and

Prejudice (again!). After reading the text students were supposed to retell it, using some words on the board, obviously provided by the teacher.

The grammar patterns in focus were used in the text, and the following vocabulary tasks technically were to equip one more text that followed, but there were certain problems as well.

Our students from specialized classes, who had up to five lessons a week, were able to cope with those tasks sometimes with certain difficulties, while students from non-specialized

122 classes, who were to use the textbook and who had only two English lessons a week, found it extremely hard and they, unfortunately, could not care less. It looked as if they had reconciled themselves to the idea that English is something they would not need in any distant future. They did not fail because they were less able or less conscientious; some of them were very good at other subjects. The mismatch was due to many other factors, one of which was the low quality of the textbooks they were using and the teaching philosophy, which underpinned the type of relationship the textbooks were to impose.

Whereas schools could not provide sufficient teaching hours for all learners of foreign languages, textbook writers and other educational theoreticians just assumed that all Soviet school children would “consciously” and “conscientiously” acquire knowledge. It looked as if the textbook writers have some idealized views of schools and schoolchildren. The reality was different, and many children would stop paying attention to learning because curricula were quite demanding. Teachers were often in between the demand to stick to the curriculum and the desire to teach. With teaching English in comprehensive schools and classes, by analogy with math, it was like teaching long division or multiplication before your students have learnt the times table!

Those attempts of mine to find a tool to fix my early often awkward efforts to teach were not in vain, as they led me to several sound conclusions. First, the main things happen in the classroom, and learning depends more on your skill to engage, motivate and to conceal your real objectives as a teacher. Second, as a teacher you can have fun as well as your students do while inventing and creating situations for communication in class. Third, my almost total disappointment in existing textbooks made me understand that no textbook will work, unless you do. And finally, a teacher’s job is about constantly repairing the mismatch between what is assumed by educational science and what ensures learning in a real classroom.

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Repairing the Mismatch

That mismatch between the curricula and textbooks on one side and the reality of the classroom on the other side did not seem to worry educational authorities too much, as teaching

English was far beyond their level of competence, and the best thing they could do was to accept the situation “with understanding”, and that was what they often did.

Teachers, on the contrary, could not put up with that situation, and they tried to repair the mismatch by working hard to create their own additional vocabulary and grammar exercises, texts for reading, and other materials for visual and verbal support. They collected them in files on the shelves of their classrooms or in those wall units in English methodology rooms if they had those in their schools, where those materials waited for other teachers who would come and use them. They also wrote texts for reading and those infamous “topics”, which students had to learn and retell instead of texts from English or American literature. There was some logic in that, because if the textbooks were of little use in teaching students to use English, we could provide them with easier and more comprehensible texts to work with and to learn, so that they would be able to reproduce what they learnt. In some way, presentation-practice-production was converted into presentation-practice-reproduction. However, the balance between the intake and the output could easily be seen and evaluated.

Many teachers liked the scheme. What a student needed to do now was to learn (!) texts by heart and reproduce them, and they called it speaking. Others, although they used the same

“techniques”, were still looking for other ways to ensure learning takes place in the classroom.

Some would use visual or verbal support, some would introduce authentic reading in their practice, some would focus more on home reading.

As I could draw quite well, I used pinmen drawings, or croquis, almost every lesson with

124 primary school students and that was my way of getting and keeping their attention while going from one activity to another. I boosted this technique though, after a friend, who was my colleague and my ex-teacher, gave me a copy of Andrew Wright’s (1976) Visual materials for language teachers. Such books were not plentiful. They were brought occasionally by those who worked in other countries, not specifically in the west, but also in Asia or Africa. Many of them had foreign languages faculty backgrounds, as well as many of their spouses. Many regarded themselves as translators and interpreters, but many were also language learners and teachers at heart, so it was mainly those people, who brought such books into the Soviet Union. Such books were not many but, first, they were different, second, they were written in good clear English, and, third, they were written with teaching, and teachers, in mind.

Surely, likewise, other books written in English entered the market, including pulp fiction and other undemanding stories. Soviet publishers, Progress and Rainbow, which specialized in publishing books in English, started producing classic works, as well as novels by contemporary writers, not only working-class ones. So, we could get books by James Joyce, H. D. Lawrence,

W.S. Maugham, and those books started to make the difference in both people’s attitude to

Western culture and English, as a medium to that culture. Add other forms of culture including movies, music, or even fashion, and it is not hard to imagine how attitude to the language as a medium to that culture started to change.

With Visual materials for language teachers (Wright, 1976) I saw the opportunity to present almost anything on the board, and very soon it became my favorite technique, which made it possible for me to make complex things look easy and comprehensible to my students.

At that time, I read the article by a Soviet Georgian teacher and researcher Amonashvili (1986)

Psychological characteristics of younger schoolchildren mastering the second language, where

125 he wrote about certain difficulties typical of young children when they had to speak in a foreign language. According to Amonashvili (1986) it was hard for little children to stick to the topic, to maintain the sequence of events or ideas in their heads, and simultaneously to pick up the linguistic means to make their speech comprehensible. My use of pinmen drawings seemed to be filling some of these gaps and I started to use them not only to illustrate this or that object or notion, but also to provide support for my students in their attempts to speak. Thus, I was not only solving the problem of getting and keeping students’ attention in the classroom. I also realized that I did not need a textbook as badly as I had before. So, in less than five years of my teaching the textbook took its place at the periphery.

Textbooks on the Periphery

It was not exclusively my decision, solution, or desire. As I grew into the teacher’s job, I learnt to identify which things were of key significance and which were less important. My colleagues helped me understand that directly and indirectly. I picked up what seemed to be realistic and natural activities, and I tried to avoid those, which were artificial and teacher- imposed.

I had one of the real epiphanies when I was about to write my university thesis, and my ex-teacher came back to the school to sub for me in my primary groups. She came before a lesson, so I could introduce her to the students and tell her what we were doing in class. She had been my English teacher, who taught us from Grade 4 to Grade 10 until we left school. This time we met as colleagues, and I was quite surprised, when she said,

“I adore working with little kids!”

“Are you serious?” asked I.

By that time, I had already worked in the primary classes and it was not that easy for me.

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As the children could not read or write, all classes were about developing oral skills. I had to talk quite often while conducting a lesson. I even lost my voice by the end of the previous school year!

“Absolutely! They are so cute, and open, and sincere! You teach one thing to them and then play with them and have fun!”

Fun? Did she say fun? I wondered if I had misheard, and although I was planning to go to the university library on that day, I decided to stay and see what she meant by fun. My little ones came in, I explained that they would have a different teacher for a couple of months, and the lesson began.

That was not only about nostalgia. That was about watching a favorite theatre act that was close to perfection. It probably was not, but it seemed to me so at that moment. She was not teaching them. She was living those forty-five minutes together with the children, talking, playing, joking, smiling, getting them to do what she wanted them to do, but doing it with such elegance and lightness, that they believed it was their desire to repeat words after her, to run to the board and back to their desks with such enthusiasm, that I at times did not recognize my pupils. The thing was that in my lessons I diligently did almost everything that she was doing, but I had almost always been detached from the students, while she was almost one of them, and you could hardly say where was the line between the students and the teacher. The line was definitely there, but it was so amazingly flexible! All her actions and the response of the students were absolutely natural and real. Besides, it was not only about having fun and making the students happy. It was about teaching them. They revised what we learnt before, practiced some new words and speech patterns, and moved around, played, read and enjoyed what they were doing. Just as Susan Halliwell wrote some years after that we should make language learning “a

127 human event, not just a set of information” (Halliwell, 1992, p. 11).

The textbook? It was not there, at least not at that lesson, and at that time I did not have any desire to ask if or how she would use one. I knew she would, if she wanted to, and I still regret that I did not ask her anything about her attitude to or ways to use a textbook in class. I remember, as students we did use some parts of our textbooks in her class, but we did so selectively, and no textbook was dominating a lesson. Looking at the quality of those textbooks I did not find it surprising or unusual.

I have been to many demo lessons before and after that. Many of them were very good and many were pre-rehearsed and boring. I have given quite a few myself, which I will refer to later, but that class in the primary was like a moment of truth for me. I realized that I was on the right track in my teaching, that we should teach with students in mind, for they should enjoy the process as well as teachers should. I realized that having a dull textbook is not the end of the world, and that there would never be a moment of complete satisfaction in this job.

Textbooks started to go to the periphery of teaching not only because they were often bland or badly written. In new textbooks (Starkov & Ostrovskiy, 1985; Starkov et al., 1988) stories were substituted by texts of encyclopedic nature and were even less engaging and dry.

Textbooks even for specialized schools did not provide enough practice in grammar or vocabulary. The exercises they comprised were often mechanistic, moralizing and non- contextualized. Parts of a textbook lesson were often disconnected and unrelated. It was often not clear where the lesson, not the textbook unit, should begin and what it should end up with. The textbooks did not offer any real or even quasi-communicative tasks. Even when they tried to introduce any tasks for communication or developing speaking skills, they did not offer much support. There was practically no scaffolding for students. No verbal or visual support.

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Here is one example from Shaverneva, Bogoroditskaya and Khrustalyova (1990):

26. Say in what interesting place you were in summer; what you saw there; what you thought about it.

27. Say when you were at the Zoo; who you went there with; what animals you watched there; what animals it was fun to watch; what you liked there.

28. Say when you went to the cinema or to the theatre; what the film (play) was about; what you thought about it.

29. Say where your camp was; who you made friends with; what you liked at the camp.

(p. 10)

I should admit that the textbook I refer to was one of the best to work with. It had quite a few exercises that aimed for some vocabulary and grammar areas, and its texts were often stories, but it was not lesson-based. Instead, it was a set of texts and exercises written or compiled around certain topics. Each unit was supposed to take about ten lessons to finish. It was furnished with a graded reader, and the teacher’s book had tests in it, but it was still hard to get the desired result of having students to use English as means of communication.

Teachers, at least during their demonstration lessons, tried to repair the patchwork built of similar textbooks by developing their own lesson procedure and materials to ensure the logical flow of the class. Such lessons often had plots like good stories, sometimes with unexpected turns of the plot, and teachers would engage students into work with the language.

Certainly, not all demonstration lessons were like this. As all teachers of English had to give at least one demo lesson during a school year, I also saw demo classes that were unfortunately as dull and boring as the textbooks those teachers were using. Such demo lessons were often methodologically correct. Teachers would use their students as musical instruments

129 that would produce sounds when they touched them. Their students would reproduce dialogues and monologues in English, but there was something wrong with such lessons. They were often pre-rehearsed and staged. Students would read their lines like actors, sometimes like bad actors who do not know their lines well enough to perform. Such lessons often consisted of what I call teacher-told-us activities. They were almost perfect, predictable, unemotional and bland. They were lifeless. Why are you doing them? Because teacher told us…

However, there were quite a few really good ones. Some were extremely good. As novice and young teachers, we learnt a lot from those teachers who worked in even more difficult circumstances than we did, and we were encouraged to meet the standards. After I started giving my demo lessons first in the primary class and later in secondary and high school, I remember we shared our impressions about our own or other teachers’ demo lessons, most of which were not textbook-based. We said how great it would be if our everyday classes would be like our demo lessons, how great it would be to have students who are engaged and learn like at our demo lessons.

Why were those demo lessons much better than our usual classes? The answer is simple.

Teachers would spend loads of time preparing them. They developed the idea for the lesson, looked for appropriate grammar or vocabulary exercises, and they often had to rewrite those.

They created visual materials of different kind, looked for materials for listening tasks and asked colleagues to record dialogues or stories, which had to be written first. They tried some of the parts of the lesson with students from different groups to make sure the activities would work when the time comes. By what I know, I can say that some teachers would spend one or two weeks on average, in between their regular classes, to plan one single demo lesson. Those demo lessons were of different level of organization. They were of different quality due to – as I

130 understand it now – the difference in material development skills and due to the difference in understanding what a good lesson should be like.

Ironically, poor demo lessons were often textbook-based and, consequently, dull, because textbooks themselves were dull. Better demo lessons were not based on textbooks but rather exploring different activities often provided in additional books on English language teaching that were not officially approved textbooks. These were highly valued, especially those published in the west (see for example Byrne, 1977; Palmer, 1921; Wright, 1976), and proved to be good teachers’ companions. Gradually, such practice of organizing seminars with demo lessons became a usual way of sharing ideas and experience between teachers of English from different specialized English schools and school districts in the city. Such practice was and still is typical for Ukraine in general.

In the 19970s and the 1980s, due to certain publications (Bim, 1977; Passov, 1985, 1988;

Rogova, Rabinovich & Sakharova, 1991; Rogova & Vereshchagina, 1988) and proactive teachers’ activity, a lesson structure was developed. It proved to be quite efficient for many years and followed a pattern with prescribed stages. It seemed that if a teacher learnt that procedure, they would feel comfortable in class and learning would take place.

A lesson would begin with a warming up activity, often ignored by those teachers who found it hard to speak spontaneously in English. It was followed by work on pronunciation, usually led by the teacher. Then, the class would work on vocabulary and grammar, then on either reading or listening (the latter was rather infrequent due to different reasons). After questions and answers about what they read or heard, students were supposed to practice dialogues. Finally, some students, usually the most able ones, would talk on the topic in focus.

That was usually the apex of a (demo) lesson, its apotheosis, although very often those topics

131 were well-prepared, pre-learnt and rehearsed before the lesson. Here, often does not mean always. Top teachers would avoid that by all means, since they realized that real communication could not be predicted or learnt by heart.

Let me make myself clear. I am not being critical. I do not judge. I am trying to describe what was going on in and out of our classroom practice. I am trying to depict how many of us developed our own individual style, based on what we learnt from our older colleagues, from each other and from books, while striving for excellence in teaching English in really difficult circumstances being non-native English-speaking teachers.

At that time, most of good demo lessons were not textbook based. Textbooks were gradually removed because their use would disrupt the flow of the lesson, their use was not beneficial for the lesson and teachers understood that it was risky to have a reading demo lesson.

Besides, textbooks were similar. They could only offer what everyone knew they could offer.

There were no others. By seeing their colleagues avoid textbooks at their demo lessons, other teachers were getting used to the idea that good lessons were non-textbook ones.

However, it was not only the response of teachers that shook the inviolability of textbooks in general. It was a certain form of scientific management for schools. In the Soviet

Union it was called the optimization of teaching and learning process. It started in the 1970s with the publications of Babanskiy (1977, 1982) and Babanskiy and Potashnik (1984) whose ideas became dominating in the 1980s. Very soon teachers’ actions were judged by the amount of input and the pace of the lesson where no minute should be lost. Its unwritten motto of maximum results with minimal effort from teachers and students turned out to be an infamous oxymoron for teachers of every school subject.

While many thought the Optimization to be a scientific and methodological breakthrough

132 and became devoted implementers and executors of the idea, those who thought about learners were critical and skeptical about the approach, although their criticism was not officially celebrated. The Soviet methodological science could not be wrong and therefore everyone should follow the scientific thought and contribute to the development of great pedagogical ideas.

One of the ideas and, eventually, results of the Optimization was the fast pace of a lesson.

Teachers who could maintain it were praised at pedagogical meetings. Their demo lessons were also highly evaluated. They thought they would supposedly teach more in the frames of one lesson and so – as the proponents of the approach believed – their students could learn more! I was one of those who were skeptical about it because it touched me as a student as well. It turned out to be a good way to get a good grade without having to learn much.

Something similar happened in the west. Smith (1986) with reference to Carlow (year unknown) writes about it:

… thirty years ago, one student went to the front of the class and worked out a problem

on the chalkboard, while the teacher critiqued the process (emphasis added) and helped

the student where necessary. Today eight students go to the chalkboard, all work

simultaneously on their problems, and the teacher critiques the results (emphasis added).

Students don't even try to understand why they are doing what their teacher tries to get

them to do, says Carlow. They try to copy what the teacher does and hope they get the

right answer. (p. 135)

Although the passage describes a lesson of mathematics, similar practices were typical of many teachers at that time. Some of our teachers practiced that and often added fast pace to the class, which made understanding quite difficult. Needless to say, those were not our favourite

133 subjects. What is learnt fast is forgotten fast.

The passage also mentions two notions related to the classroom: process and result. I remember how one of the top educational administrators once said to a group of school principals, “We don’t care what you do with them. We need results!” By them he meant schoolchildren, and it was then when I started to draw a line between the notions of process and result.

With years it became obvious to me that those people who are far from the real classroom think more of results, while whose who face twenty to forty students every day may one day come to understand, that if the process is organized correctly, the result will often take care of itself. However, there is still no consensus among teachers and educators as for what the process should be like, what a language lesson should be like, or how textbooks should enhance language learning.

When thinking about the fruits of the Optimization, I still remember a case when years later, I was invited to attend a demo lesson as an experienced teacher. It was a school district seminar and there were about ten to fifteen teachers. During that one forty-five-minute lesson I counted twenty-six activities that the teacher did with her students. The students were in Grade 1.

They were six or seven years old. It meant they had less than two minutes on average for one activity. When the seminar was over, and the participants left, they asked my opinion. I said that the lesson was in fact logically planned and then asked why the teacher had planned so many activities, for children did not seem to work on any of them long enough. They said that the aim of the lesson was to show to teacher colleagues as many activities as possible. Whereas I could agree that such an objective might theoretically exist, I said I thought that those activities should rather be practiced and discussed with teacher participants in the form of a workshop, but

134 definitely not with young children in class. I tried to make a point that many of the teacher participants left with the idea, that any lesson in the primary should go like that one while it should not. I saw that I need not have said that. I was in the minority.

To sum it up, I should say that in the 1970s and 1980s we neither studied nor taught entirely by the textbook. There were some moments of congruence between the textbook, the students and the teacher, though. Such moments were about stories, which resonated with all of us even in those days of non-communicative methodology.

In those years though, we as teachers had to work with textbooks in many different ways, often ignoring them. We would often develop our own teaching materials either for a single class or for a series of lessons, or for demo lessons. Such lessons had to be engaging, logical and addressing all linguistic skills, something our textbooks did not do! However, it was hard to write anything like a textbook, possibly because we, as teachers, really focused on concrete students in our own groups and did not go universal. Freebairn (2000) has her own explanation for such tasks to be insurmountable for working teachers.

Anyway, we were swiftly approaching the year of 1991 and we did not know how our lives would change, and how that change would affect our teaching English.

Do-It-Yourself Time

Independence did not come unexpected. However, with all the euphoria of many and the bewilderment of many others, the country started its own way on the road to freedom practically being torn apart between two antagonistic ideas – pro-Soviet, later pro-Russian or pro-imperial, and pro-Ukrainian. While economies suffered from severe recession after the collapse of military oriented enterprises, and the middle-class of private entrepreneurs only started to take shape, schools went on teaching children, and teachers in general remained in their classrooms.

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Textbooks remained the same as well. There were merely no others, and those Moscow textbooks started to be more and more unsuitable with every academic year. Whole textbook units became outdated, and teachers began rejecting them, because their topics became irrelevant, and, also because children were already out of the context. Apart from the language, they had to learn something that was not there anymore, something that ceased to exist. What seemed relevant some eight years ago became totally nonfunctional.

For example, Unit 5 in Shaverneva et al (1990) was titled Red Square Is Dear to the

Soviet People, and Unit 16 Live And Study As Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Taught. That was how the word change was introduced in Unit 5:

to change [tʃeındƷ] : When you come to Red Square, you can always see two soldiers on

duty in front of the Lenin Mausoleum. They change every hour. (p. 77)

It is true that you can omit some material from the textbook (Grant, 1987), but you cannot possibly omit the whole unit or two. In that case, the whole system of language areas in the textbook would start to fall apart. Before long, it was obvious that sooner or later those textbooks would go away forever.

Besides, the ways of Moscow textbooks starting with Shaverneva et al. (1990) resembled

The Practical English Course by Arakin (1972/1996) more and more.

One can easily compare Vocabulary notes in Arakin’s textbooks with those in textbooks for schoolchildren above and below.

Vocabulary notes

angry adj сердитый, раздраженный, разгневанный; anger n; to be angry with smb.

Сердиться на кого-л., e.g. She was angry with me because I was late.

silence n тишина, молчание; silent adj тихий, молчаливый; Keep silent! Соблюдайте

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тишину! e.g. Keep silent, I can’t hear anything!

to leave school (no article!) оканчивать школу; Cf. to go to school, to go by bus, to go to bed

entrance n entrance exams Ant. exit; enter vt; Syn. сome vi; Ant leave vt, e.g. He entered Room 5. Come in!

(Arakin, Ed., 1972/1996, p. 126)

7. promote vt 1) to give higher position or rank, e.g. He was promoted lieutenant (or to be lieutenant). A pupil is promoted from one form (grade, class) to the next if his progress is satisfactory. 2) to encourage; to support; to help to grow or develop, e.g. We promoted the campaign for banning nuclear tests. I think we ought to promote that scheme.

promotion n 1) advancement to higher rank, e.g. He was given a promotion and an increase in salary. He hopes to get (win, gain) a promotion soon. 2) support, helping along to success, e.g. The doctors were busy in the promotion of a health campaign.

(Arakin, Ed., 1982/2000, p. 50)

VII. a) Read with the teacher.

hurry, be in a hurry; Don’t hurry. We have time enough to catch the train. He is in a hurry. She is in a hurry to leave. Why are you in such a hurry?

narrow, a narrow street, a narrow bridge; Streets in the old part of the town are narrow.

bridge, bridges; They are going to build a new bridge across the river.

across, across the street, across the river, across the road; There is a forest across the field.

(Rogova & Rozhkova, 1993, p. 235)

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If Krug (1896) criticized 19th century methods of teaching foreign languages for adapting

“the infant’s way to an adult” (p. 578), Soviet textbook writers did exactly the opposite. Born somewhere in the 1920s and revived in the 1970s the conscious-comparative method seemed to have infiltrated in textbook writers’ blood forever.

However, Moscow textbooks did not go out of use in one day. Some of them proved to be more appealing to teachers than others. Some schools went on using them as far as to the early 2000s. It can be explained by the fact that those textbooks were just better written than new

Ukrainian ones.

The Do-It-Yourself Process

In 1991, one of our top teachers emigrated to the US, and I was made an offer to teach his high school students. Before that, my oldest pupils were 12 years old and that was quite a transition for me. I managed to keep two groups of my previously taught students, who were in grade 4 at that time, and went into new waters of high school. Everything was different there, the students, their relations with the teacher, the approaches to teaching, and, as you can guess, the textbooks. Those were just awful.

I think the authors (Stupnikov & Shershevskaya, 1977) assumed that high school students would do everything the teacher would tell them to do. That was not the application of adult ways, but academic ways to teenagers. It was like going back not to the 1970s, but at least to the

1950s. I opened it on page 39. There were questions coming right after the text “On an English

Farm in October”. There was no task, but supposedly it was a typical question-and-answer type of comprehension. It read:

1. Living in a big city has some advantages – good libraries, theatres, etc. What are the

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advantages of living in the country?

2. What is the best season for sowing wheat (rye, oats, corn) in this region?

3 Where do they sow rice in the U.S.S.R.?

4 What must a farmer do before sowing the field with seed?

5 What agricultural implement (tool) is to be used for cutting and turning up the soil (for

harrowing, sowing, reaping, threshing, mowing)?

[My favourite one was number 7 though.]

7 What birds must be scared away from fields and orchards? (rooks, starlings, sparrows,

etc.) To scare birds away from crops, a scarecrow is used. What does a scarecrow look

like? (Stupnikov & Shershevskaya, 1977, p. 39)

There were texts and questions, texts and questions, more texts and more questions. At that moment, I could have remembered – “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice,

“without pictures or conversation?”

Luckily, we already felt quite flexible with such textbooks. We also had various non-

Soviet English books and coursebooks at hand. Although they were not plentiful, just one copy of each per whole school, they turned out to be those straws we grasped in hope to retrieve a seemingly desperate situation.

What we did was rejecting the old textbooks completely in some grades, referring occasionally to some in the middle school, and admitting that the primary grades had the biggest gap in terms of materials. In a way that was close to what Thornbury (2000) wrote about Dogme

ELT teaching: we went on teaching English without any particular textbook in mind and at hand.

We still had our calendar plans based on previously used Moscow textbooks, but even those calendar plans were gradually passing into oblivion.

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We went on to find a gingerbread man solution for the situation. So, in the big batch of lesson-oriented dough, we put some self-written texts for the eyes, some grammar books for the brain, several linguaphone courses for the ears, and whatever visuals we could find for the dressing. The rest was totally individual teachers’ responsibility to add flavour to the product to use in class. Thus, the school started to use the following books and linguaphone courses in different grades: Wee Sing and Play (Beall & Nipp, 1981) in the primary and lower secondary classes, Junior English (year unknown) in lower secondary, English Course for Beginners

(Gimson, 1981) for upper-secondary and Intermediate English (Gimson, 1976) for high school.

The courses did provide motivation for students and teachers. They also were a good solution for quite a long time as they served as a map for EFL teaching and learning. So

Intermediate English (Gimson, 1976) had solid vocabulary input: words with multiple meanings, idioms, phrasal verbs, conversational chunks, something Moscow textbooks never had!

Moreover, it had dialogues and topics that presented one whole storyline with unexpected turns, often pierced with irony and humor. There was nothing on Communism or Capitalism, social or class struggle, or the like. The topics were less political but more thought-provoking. The following is an excerpt from Intermediate English (Gimson, 1976) and serves as a good example of good potential for a follow-up discussion:

Society has always been competitive, but in this century life is perhaps more competitive

than in any previous era. We are taught, almost from birth, to compare ourselves in mind

and body with the people around us. Even as children we are already intent on showing

that we are not merely different from our fellows but in some way superior to them.

School life is an eternal competition (...)

(...) Are we interested in proving our superiority – or is it that we take a sadistic delight in

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proving that some poor fellow being is inferior to us? (Programme 13, p. 18)

We did not question the authenticity of the materials the way it is highlighted now. For us the language of those courses was different from the language we had exposure to before. It was written with skill and was consumed with pleasure, and although the courses did not replace

Moscow textbooks completely, both students and teachers enjoyed working with them. The courses provided ideas for our classes, and teachers used them to liven up the atmosphere in the classroom and furnish their efforts to disguise the older Soviet textbooks or rather add new flavour to the senescent textbooks and the National Curriculum.

To say that only the new resources enhanced our teaching in those days would be an exaggeration. It was also teachers’ personalities and skills, their knowledge of English and the combination of other factors that started changing language teaching and made language learning more successful, with teachers’ skills being the most important factor. Those years were tough in that there were practically no educational management for schools coming from educational authorities. The only thing they could do at that time was watching classroom education change, while we were active part of that change, and by we I do not mean teachers only.

I must pay tribute to those school principals and directors of studies who managed schools and did not let them fall apart, while giving their teachers the freedom to look for new ways of getting students learn in those years. With hyperinflation in the country, with delays in biweekly and monthly payments, with practically no funds for renovating schools, with teachers leaving schools to earn their bread somewhere else, they managed to maintain order in schools, and those who trusted their teachers without being gullible as far as teaching methods were concerned made their schools into real places for learning.

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Towards Material Writing

By 1990, I had been working for about six years and it was time for me to go through the process of teacher accreditation, or attestation as it was called in Ukraine. One part of that process was delivering a series of lessons on the topic taught according to the plan. The director of studies, the school principal would visit those lessons, and colleague teachers were encouraged to come as well. That was not just like one usual demo lesson. The topic for the series was in the National Curriculum and in the calendar plan, and it was impossible to ignore it or change it. However, you could choose a grade. I opted for one group in Grade 5.

The only “official” textbook I had was the one I referred to earlier: English V

(Shaverneva et al., 1990). It could well be one of the previous editions, but it did not make any difference as they were the same: the structure, the layout, the text, the exercises. Going by the book, teaching page by page was unacceptable for me, so I decided to play around the textbook to (1) plan the lessons with students in mind, considering their level of maturity and level of

English, (2) to plan the lessons in the frames of the accepted methodology, and (3) to use other resources and my skills to make the lessons engaging, educational and language and skill oriented.

Another part of the process was the description of a teacher’s ways and findings in their work, and some years later, my series of lessons was published by Kharkiv Teacher In-Service

Training Institute (Chebotaryov, 1995). Although I could not find any trace of the original typewritten version, which had some theory and the description of my ways, it was interesting to find the only copy of the journal with the series of lessons in the Institute library.

I chose just one lesson to show how I adapted the textbook material for one of the lessons in the series (Chebotaryov, 1995, pp. 109 – 111)

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Figure 1. Chebotaryov, 1995, pp. 111, restored pictures.

Eight lessons – five during one week and three during the following week – were planned as a sequence of related mini-stories or situations, which were united by one textbook topic Be

Polite! Don’t Be Naughty! Each lesson would often be a logical follow-up of the previous one.

I tried to create situations, which would make classroom reading, listening and working on grammar covert and engaging for my nine- and ten-year-old students. By then they were used to having our director of studies in class during all our lessons and were reacting readily. In fact,

I think they were playing their parts just the way I was playing mine. I did not pre-rehearse anything with them, and every lesson I tried to have something unexpected to keep them interested and engaged. Besides, I did know their learning and linguistic abilities, so I could write some parts with them in mind.

The lesson was written as a trip to Magic Land. Today it sounds a bit naive, but in that situation, it worked well. For the start, we were to identify how well – and fast – they could react to evaluate certain situations, based on the previously learnt material. They had to react with phrases like “That’s good!” or “That’s bad!”, “That’s right!” or “That’s wrong!” to sentences

143 like “Mike usually wipes his dirty hands on the towel”. By reacting promptly and correctly, they were able to get on a spaceship.

During the flight, I showed them the top picture on the left in Figure 1 and provided a model for their anticipated utterances. Those would be something like “It’s like a dream... I can see three moons!” Then, after we landed, I asked them if they were surprised and why and referred them to the next picture. They would say, “I’m surprised because the pig can fly!” or

“The mouse is larger than the elephant” and the like.

The next point was the Echo Cave, which they could pass safely only by repeating perfectly after the tape, which was our Junior English (year unknown) linguaphone course.

Having passed that, we found ourselves in front of the Singing Bush and had to study the guide

(which was the textbook grammar exercises) for some correct answers to the Bush. The Singing

Bush was the teacher with a guitar. I had made one of the exercises into a simple song. I would sing, “How does a happy girl laugh?” and they had to reply, “Happily!” and so on.

The final hurdle on the road was the Dragon from the final picture. Before the Dragon could see us, the kids would describe it the way they could. I encouraged them to say how it moved, looked or spoke, as I wanted then to use the adverbs they just learnt. Our final job was to lull the Dragon to sleep by reading to him. That was when a Mary Poppins story (Shaverneva et al., 1990), which students had to read, would logically fit into the course of the lesson.

The homework was set as a preparation for the final quest, which would happen in the following lesson.

Actually, I did not have to write it like I did, as at that time, the accreditation process was formalized and did not add to anything but the teacher’ headache or experience. It would not result in any promotion or bigger salary, so I did it because I came to like it, and because it

144 seemed the right thing for me to do. As I look back at that period today, I realize that by describing the process and the series I was shaping my own understanding of what a lesson should be like, and I would expect the same form a textbook.

Then, my director of studies and I considered that to be a real success as the description of my work experience attracted the attention of methodologists at Kharkiv Teacher Training

Institute, and I was invited to present it at the Institute. Looking back, I see one more side to it.

By focusing on writing materials for the series, which technically took slightly more than a couple of weeks, I paid very little attention, if any, to preparing to my other lessons. I did not neglect my teacher’s duties, I tried to teach other students, but I had a feeling that during those lessons I did not focus much on what was going on in my other classes. Nor did I prepare carefully to those lessons, as I had to write materials for my accreditation lessons. It was not unusual, it was rather typical for all of us, and although my other lessons may not have been bad,

I had a feeling that they were close to mediocre. It was the first time for me to realize that good teaching and good material writing might not go in perfect unison. One or the other would suffer.

The Big Project

It was about that time when a colleague asked if I would want to write a textbook for the primary. I did not work with little children for some time then, but it was quite fresh in memory, and besides my son was five and in a couple of years he would go to school. It was appealing to have written a textbook for them using our knowledge and skill in the area.

That was the first real case when I realized that I could do something very few of my colleagues could do. Indeed, I heard more than once that as I could do other things apart from teaching – drawing, playing music, writing poetry, performing, etc. – it was easier for me to get

145 more of the existing textbooks and to bring more to the lesson than they could. I would often take it as mere flattering because in my case I did not think of my skills as of something extraordinary. I did not sing, play or draw well enough to seriously consider those skills as something real. Besides, there were other teachers who could do the same better than me. They wrote texts and exercises, they collected visuals for different topics (something I personally found very boring to do), they could deliver excellent demo lessons, and still they would say that they were not ready to write anything but simple texts or exercises for the classroom!

We started with studying some textbook analogues, both Soviet and western, old and new, and went on to develop the concept for the future textbook. I inclined to have one single storyline for the whole book, and we agreed to have it without sticking too strictly to it. We agreed on having animals as characters and a monkey called Jim as the central one. The situations were written around the topics of children’s immediate interest – Toys, Friends,

Birthday, etc. – and the topics from the existing National Curriculum (1991/1996).

The Curriculum we used was based on the Moscow textbooks already mentioned, and I have always had a strong feeling that those textbooks appeared prior to the Curriculum as the latter was a perfect description of the former. In our case, we went from the approved National

Curriculum and its requirements to the textbook. We also decided to make it structured and grammar-based without focusing much on grammar, just language chunks and common phrases children usually learn when they start learning English.

To cut it short, we were eager beavers (McBeath, 2006). Apart from writing, my colleague would edit and proofread the texts and dialogues, I would write poems and songs and illustrated the whole book. We wrote and rewrote situations and managed to take it from long lines of words and sentences to comic-like situations with captions or short dialogues with

146 pictures.

The work on the textbook took all our free time, not only at work but at home as well.

We thought of the characters, the plot, the situations, and practically worked from morning till night. In the morning, when I was about to start a lesson, she would bring one or two pages of text or suggested situation. I took it and between my lessons or sometimes even at the lessons I would think of how to present the material (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Krivchikova and Chebotaryov (1995), manuscript pages, author’s archive.

We covered practically all topics from the NC and in five or six months we were more or less satisfied with what we had. It was not the proposal. Neither was it the first or second draft.

From my present experience, I would describe the manuscript as one ready to be piloted. We presented that to our school colleagues and administration. They knew we were working on that, and they were eager to see the result. Their feedback was overall positive, and as the pages computer-generated and printed, thanks to a parent of one of our students, we thought it would be reasonable to try the book in our primary classrooms.

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We also presented our project at a city seminar to teachers and directors of studies of

Kharkiv specialized schools. The teachers were very interested and gave their comments, which were reserved but positive. However, one of the directors of studies with some (post-)Soviet restraint and self-control said that their school might start piloting or working with the book but only if we wrote a teacher’s guide to let teachers know what they should do with the material. He also added that it would be good to have the official approval for using the book. Our arguments that the guides for the existing Moscow textbooks were of little use or help, or that to get the approval from a school district was not a problem were not convincing.

On the one hand, they were right, as teachers do need teacher’s notes or guides when they start teaching with something new, but we were partly burnt out and the prospect of writing a manual to explain what seemed obvious to us was not at all exciting. On the other hand, when you know what you should do in the classroom, you do not always need such guides. Besides, in the time of real lack of new materials, we thought that our work was worth trying, especially when the existing materials were either dated or inappropriate. We also assumed, as people often do, that teachers from other schools shared the same approaches and the same teacher philosophy as we did. We assumed that they professed the same way of teaching English, putting communication in the first place and making it meaningful, and maybe in many individual teacher cases it was so. However, decision making was not ours. Besides, with the school year coming to a close and summer holidays approaching fast, the question of piloting was put off until later, and it turned into one more ordinary seminar with no decision made.

With such feedback and reality, we decided to pilot it in our school only. The parents of the future first-graders agreed to pay for copying the materials, and in September 1992 every child in the first grades had a copy. Our textbook, if we may call it so, started its life in the

148 classroom to become the major book for the primary in our school for about eight years. See

Figure 3 as an example of the layout of pages from the book. Topic: Jim’s Birthday.

Figure 3. Krivchikova and Chebotaryov (1995) manuscript pages, author’s archive.

I still regret that I did not teach with that book of ours. I did not teach my own son with the book that I wrote, although I could have! The reason was still in me. I kept thinking that I would not be the best choice of a teacher for them, as I was still feeling to be in the shade of my more experienced colleagues. Frankly speaking, when I started teaching their group two years later, I had to retrain them not to be afraid of the teacher and to feel the urge for learning. The pain is still with me.

However, there was something more to the story.

Attempts to Publish

We tried to find publishers who would invest in our project, and I talked to different people who might be close to that business. The Department of Education was of little help as they had other worries and problems to solve. In a way I became my own agent and very soon I

149 nearly hated the process. With the economy plummeting and the absence of publishers’ practice of dealing with materials in English, the most frequent answer I heard at that time was, “Leave your book with us and we’ll calculate the cost.” I was not ready to do it as I feared that we would not see it again, as the chance to be cheated at that time was extremely high. When I said once that I cannot leave the book with them as I am not the only author of the book, I heard, “Then we have nothing to talk about!” Others would say, “We can do it for you but at your own risk and expense. We publish. You buy it from us, but what will you do with that pile of paper!”

Once I went to see a publisher, who after a comparatively short talk about the book with no obvious follow-up or interest in our project, asked if I could translate from English, as they had an idea to start a series of books by foreign authors. I said that I could.

“You know, we ‘d like to see how well you translate. Could you make a test translation for us?”

I reluctantly agreed, and she produced fifty (!) pages of densely printed text and handed them to me. I knew what it meant. Fifty pages from me, fifty more from some other people desperately looking for jobs to make ends meet, then they apologize and say that your translation was not what they exactly expected, no translator is hired, but they edit what they get and have one complete book translated for free!

“I can tell if my students can translate or not by reading just one page of their work. To see if I can translate or not, you gave me fifty”, said I. Then I smiled and left.

I did meet some people in the newly developed publishing business who I would trust, but they were not interested in publishing for education. In a way it was the wrong timing.

The Renaissance Foundation Story

In 1993, the International Renaissance (Soros) Foundation started a program called The

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Transformation of Humanities in Ukraine. The main goal of the Program was the publication of the works of foreign and home scientists, philosophers, economists with the idea of replacing the

Soviet paradigms in the areas of economics, law, sociology and culture. One of the streams of the Program was education, with opportunities for new authors to participate in the area of textbook writing. A friend told me about it, and the Jim story got a new turn.

By that time, our enthusiasm faded a bit. The textbook was in use in the school, no other institution seemed to be interested, we had other plans. However, I saw a chance to bring the book to a wider audience and at the same time to get some money to improve it. Although it was a good chance for us to take the book to the higher level, we did not try hard enough to really improve it. First, it seemed to us that it was good. It worked in the school, and the students and teachers loved it.

I finally managed to persuade my colleague to apply with our ready-made project, and we invested our time once again, this time to provide the plan of the book, the description and – after the nomination and the first feedback – some exercises. In the fall of 1994, our textbook was approved for publication.

The manuscript and the funds for publication was sent to “Prapor”, the ex-Communist publishing house in Kharkiv. It was probably assumed that it would be easier for us and the publisher to communicate. However, it turned out to be a whole nine yards of misunderstanding and polite refusals of our participation in the process. My frequent visits to the house and meetings with the editor would only result in repeated assurances that everything was going fine, and I did not need to worry. From my experience I could tell that if anything went without a singe problem, the bigger problems would arise at the end, but still I could not get any closer to the publication process.

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To cut it short, the textbook was published with fifty-seven (!) misprints, very dense and open colours in the illustrations, the main character painted in ugly purple colour, and a typo in the title on the book’s spine, which ironically was in Ukrainian (Tymoshyk, 2012). The only answer to our criticism was that the funds were scarce and there was no way to repair it. To sum, if any editors’ and publishers’ “linguistic” faults could be explained due to their lack of experience in dealing with releasing English books, all the other remained unanswered. The very fact of seeing the textbook in print was spoilt by those multiple moments of miscommunication and resulting blunders.

Still, the book looked appropriate for the classroom, and I secretly hoped, that if there were any further editions, there was a chance to make it into something really suitable for the primary classroom in the new Ukrainian school. In reality, there was another side to the story, and it was related to how the official pedagogical science viewed the way textbooks should be written.

Ministry of Education Story

It is due to this research that I found out the story of official textbook writing in the

Soviet Union and how one school of thought dominated the domain of EFL textbook writing and production. The textbooks by Borisov et al. (1966) and Khanova (1967) were rather exceptions from the common rule, which implied that textbooks for school should be based on the scientific and methodological grounds developed by Soviet school of methodology. The facts that very often those textbooks resembled their outdated western analogues or were written without much understanding of how the textbooks would work in the frames of a lesson, were not considered.

It was a classic case of a mismatch between the theory and the practice, between the desired goal and the poor implementation of the ways to reach that goal.

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It is interesting how West (1960) describes that mismatch in the Soviet system of textbook production. After outlining some merits of having (1) “a specially constituted body”, which could potentially have better chances than an individual writer to produce good textbooks,

(2) necessary “trial editions” and (3) a framework for future teacher training (p.82), West writes:

Under a policy of nationalization the work might become bogged down in committees

probably largely consisting of learnt but inexpert persons: the Russian textbooks show

symptoms of domination of the committee by a phonetician and professorial elements

and absence of guidance from experienced teachers (emphasis added) or inspectors who

know what can or cannot be done in favourable as well as unfavourable circumstances.

(p. 82)

He also questions the validity and exceptionality of the Soviet methodology by saying that there seems to be “no preliminary survey of the best textbooks available in other countries”

(p. 81) and adds,

The books seem to have been drafted in committee and then sent out for (inadequate)

testing in the classes, instead of being evolved in the classroom (emphasis added) . . . and

finally observed by the producers in action in an unfavourable class with a weak teacher.

As a result the textbook lessons lack unity and directness of aim, demand constant

teacher-intervention and put a needlessly heavy strain (emphasis added) on the teachers.

They contain a number of misplacements of idiom, vocabulary and subject matter, as

well as “technical hitches” and faultily designed Practice Units. The good results in

English-learning observed in the Russian schools are a tribute to the teachers’ success in

overcoming the defects of their textbooks, and, with better textbooks, might be even more

notable. (p. 81)

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West’s (1960) words match in time with the debate of the 1950s in the way that his words echo the worries of those scholars who led the discussion against the settled ways of teaching foreign languages in the Soviet Union.

The reason I reflect on the debate here again is that I find West’s words typical not only for that time; with some exceptions of the 1960s, his description unfortunately was true for many years and decades to follow.

That is why it is not hard to understand now why the official bodies at that time were neglecting our book. Several meetings at seminars that we attend later in 1994 did not result in any offer to cooperate. I had an impression that many of those who were supposed to plan the change in new political and social context just did not know what to do and for almost one decade left schools alone. The editor-in-chief of the Kharkiv publishing house said they had very poor feedback, the films with the pages of the book were reported to be lost or damaged, and the official story of the project was over.

About seven years later, when I was already working for Pearson Ukraine and met new people from the Ministry and from teacher training institutes, I heard a story of how our textbook was severely criticized at the time of its publication during a seminar organized by the Ministry of Education. A speaker from the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences described our textbook as absolutely inappropriate for use in schools with its monkeys, piglets, and other animal characters, with no scientific or methodological background and exercise base. Such feedback in fact prescribed the in-service teacher training institutes not to recommend the book for schools.

I met him at a seminar soon after I heard the story. I knew that he knew who I was, and I was not surprised when he made a couple of jokes like, “Let’s speak English with Jim!” referring to the title of the book. “We sure can”, said I, returning the pun. Each of us was busy doing our

154 own jobs, and later that day when I ran into him again, he said, “Let’s talk about it. I’m interested”. After over ten years from putting the first words and the first situations on paper, I was not. The timing was wrong again.

The British Council Story

When the British Council Resource Centre opened in Kharkiv in 1994, I was busy trying to make the most of our manuscript. Frankly, dealing with people outside the school affected my teaching even worse than writing the book. When you write, your emotions are mostly positive, and the process of writing can really enhance your teaching due to the enthusiasm you experience and the result you get from your writing, as you write for the students you teach or are about to teach. When you should deal with people around education, you find it hard to get your ideas across as most of them are far from real classrooms and who have formed their ideas about education based on assumptions or implications. Besides, when you cannot get what you expect to get, and that was what happened to our project, you should have exceptional moral endurance to persist through all possible criticism and pressure. Needless to say, it does affect your emotionality. So, the opening of the British Council Centre saved me from focusing too much on the lack of the outcome of our project and on my negative emotions.

I was not in the pessimistic mood. I kept on teaching, and in many ways, it was teaching and addressing my students needs that helped me forget about the bitter outcome of the project, as there were many good sides to it. However, it was the British Council Centre with its library full of books and textbooks in English, that immediately attracted me. It was there that I saw textbooks of English that were very different form what we used to have and, you can guess, from what we had written. It was the British Council Centre, that became the place where you would find yourself to be part of the rapidly forming English teaching community.

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A three-week British Council seminar at the University of Leeds in 1995 added more to shaping of my teaching rather than material writing skills, but the Centre was the place where I discovered a textbook, which at that time perfectly fit my teaching philosophy.

From this time on I will have to go back and forth in time again as it is impossible to follow the chronological order of the events.

Making the Match

Teachers could borrow a set of textbooks for their classes for two or three weeks and try them with their students. That was when I first discovered Blueprint series (Abbs & Freebairn,

1991). I did not accept it without reservation though, as it also looked different from what we used to work with. However, very soon, I could see how skillfully the authors had built activities around a lesson topic, similar to how we did it while preparing for our demo lessons. A textbook unit was not text-based or grammar-based; it was constructed with the class in mind.

A lesson or unit, although there were no words like unit or lesson, would begin with a warm-up talk which would tune the class into the topic of the lesson. Then the students would read a short text or listen to a dialogue followed by Communication Focus and/or Grammar

Focus boxes, each of which was linked to mini-speaking tasks. More reading or listening would follow with either writing or group discussion at the end of the class. The workbook was of secondary importance, but it provided more activities and exercises to reinforce the language, and, what was more important for the teacher, they were ready-made, so they could focus more on managing the class and teaching and not on developing materials to fill huge gaps in existing textbooks.

While many justly consider Headway (Soars & Soars, 1986) to be a seminal work in textbook writing (see Harwood, 2014; Prodromou & Mishen, 2008), I still think that it was the

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Blueprint series that was second to none in terms of helping novice and inexperienced teachers develop teaching skills and lesson planning skills.

I think our students were tired of Moscow textbooks, which were still partially in use, as much as we were, and they willingly accepted the new materials. Besides, the new textbooks looked different and although they were written for young adults and not for teenagers, my students did not have any big problems while dealing with adult topics, like job interviews. I think they simply viewed the characters in the textbook as role models and acted accordingly.

From then on, my understanding of what a lesson should be like developed together with my understanding of the role of a good textbook in the teacher’s life. From that time my efforts of engaging students in working with the language during a lesson or a series of lessons became empowered with a well-developed, well-structured units in the textbook, and the features of a good textbook for the language classroom began to take shape.

It was 1997. The Blueprint series (Abbs & Freebairn, 1991) was already a bit outdated as it was in the market for about six years (which did not matter much to me then). Its content was not specifically for children in the lower secondary school, but the way it helped my twelve-year- old students to open up and start using English as a means for communication was really close to magical. It matched my teaching style and what was more important it scaffolded the students’ willingness to communicate in English.

As a teacher I did not need to spend endless hours to write exercises and think of the plot of a lesson to teach any more. I finally had the luxury of playing with the content already provided and make work on the language into a communication game, well-written and well- directed. My lessons became more communicative and even hard grammar areas were not as challenging as they used to be because with the help of the coursebook I managed to hide or

157 disguise the boring exercise-based parts as some steps towards more interesting and engaging moments.

Was it a perfect match? I would not say so for the reasons described above, as I found some content to be out of the circle of my students’ interests, and it was obvious. Another reason was that it did not match the requirements of the curriculum and of accepted testing practices and

I would often find it necessary to stop using the textbook and to address to some other topics to be in line with the other teachers’ groups. And although my endeavour was approved by our director of studies, there were moments of incongruity between what we preached and how we tested students’ knowledge at that time. However, we were steadily moving towards another stage of our relationship with textbooks, and it happened so that I had to take the lead. The road was not without its ups and downs and those were due to the long absence of contact with the western school of methodology of teaching foreign languages. In the 1990s, the organizations like British or American Councils helped Ukrainian teachers fill that gap.

By 1998, I was the first (but not the last) teacher in the school to win the Teacher of the

Year city and regional contests, to have attended the British Council Summer School at the

University of Leeds, and to become a national winner of “US – Ukraine Awards for Excellence in Teaching” program and had my say in formulating the school policy in the area of teaching

English. Besides, most of my more experienced colleagues including my co-author for our primary textbook project had left the school for various reasons.

It was the time when British coursebooks started to appear in bookshops usually run by enthusiasts. Some of them later became first distributors or even representatives of international publishers in Ukraine. It was also the time when Ukrainian textbook writing began to take its shape and paved its usual official way to the schools.

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Back to the Future, or Onward to the Past?

The principal textbook ideologist and writer of the mid-1990s was Vasyl Plakhotnik whose understanding of what EFL textbooks should be like was heavily influenced by the infamous principles of conscious-comparative and conscious-practical methods of teaching foreign languages in the Soviet Union.

That was what Plakhotnik (2002) wrote on the principles of teaching English in the primary school:

The only way out of the current situation is to teach a child to independently construct

phrases. They can be constructed by analogy as was offered by neodirect methods (the

famous perennial experience of using textbooks by A. P. Starkov), or according to the

rules of sentence construction (this methodology was used in our country after World

War II before 1961). Modern methodological science offers forming grammar skills in a

foreign language on the existing skills in the mother tongue with consideration of the

character of those skills in both languages: from transferring the skills (constructing by

analogy) to their adjustment (rules-instructions) and making new ones (explanation of the

phenomenon absent in the mother tongue). (p. 99)

Later in the same article he gave some examples of activities suitable in his opinion for working with children of seven while developing their lexical and grammatical skills as he called them:

The students read sentences with translation, and then, having covered the left side of the

exercise, translate into English what is written in Ukrainian. Time spent for the exercise

is 20 seconds. That is what students have to do after they train at home.

Doing such exercises is of greatest importance for successful learning. (p. 103)

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Was I reading some letters by Lenin (1901/1975) on his ideas about learning a foreign language again? Or were they Scherba’s (1947/1974) undeveloped ideas that found their way into the minds of textbook and article writers? No, that was 2002, the beginning of the 21st century witnessing the striking indestructibility of approaches which proved to be NOT working in the classrooms but were still imposed with some unexplainably irrational persistence.

Regardless of what Plakhotnik (2002) wrote, the article continued one trend that was typical for Soviet and post-Soviet methodological science: to cite home writers and researchers and to almost completely ignore western ones. Such adherence to the traditions of conscious- comparative and conscious-practical methods of teaching foreign languages is still present today.

See, for example, Paliy (2014) who while referring to “existing works of domestic and foreign scientists” (p. 9) does not reference any but Soviet, Ukrainian or Russian publications. Such reluctance or disinclination to accept western ideas on teaching foreign languages limits the opportunities of bringing ideas to the classrooms.

At the same time Paliy (2014) provides one good explanation of why the textbooks of the

Soviet past were not very efficient in the schools. He writes about the textbooks of the 1980s:

It is hardly possible to blame the authors of textbooks on foreign languages of those years

as they were guided by normative documents and methodological provisions which were

valid at that time. (…) All initiatives and innovations were limited by constraints of the

current educational programs, the provisions of which the authors had to adhere to when

creating educational literature. (p. 7)

Ironically, textbook writers, who were close to the Institute of Methods of Teaching during Soviet times, would take an active part in compiling the National Curricula and developing and shaping methodological approaches. However, referring to the constraints of the

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National Curriculum have always been a good excuse for many of mediocre teachers and, as it appears, textbook writers.

The Do-It-Yourself Fruit. The School Story

With no direct guidance from the Ministry as for teaching materials and textbooks, many schools used what they could find to rescue the drowning (Il’f & Petrov, 1997). The situation was complicated by the new trend for schools to officially qualify to become gymnasia or lyceums, which would mean having different syllabi from comprehensive schools. Different syllabi would often mean more teaching hours of English. By having more English classes some schools hoped to attract parents of potential students. Our school was no exception, but with established approaches to teaching languages and other subjects we had less problems with parents who would choose our school for their children.

I still think that time to be the most fruitful, when despite huge economic difficulties in the country and consequently in families, teachers, who were practically left alone facing their students and eventually the society, learnt to do wonderful things in their classrooms.

In our school, reprinted copies of the semi-finished textbook of ours were still in use in

Grades 1 and 2, but the teachers felt they needed some supplement to the existing material. So, one of the novice teachers wrote additional exercises to the textbook. She did it all by herself, and the other primary English teachers were quite happy about it, because now they had something which we as authors did not mange to do properly – simple and straightforward exercises to the stories in the textbook. They were rather traditional: Read the words. Read the sentences and translate. Look at page 77. Answer the questions. Read the sentences. Make questions. However, they provided a bridge between the stories in the book and the teachers’ understanding of what to do after the students read them and acquire the language in context.

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It turned out to be a good addition to the book and of great help for the teachers in Grade

2, who now could introduce reading and activate the vocabulary and grammar presented in the storyline. Besides, if we consider that it was done by a single teacher, a solo effort of another enthusiastic eager beaver (McBeath, 2006), like ourselves several years before that, by a teacher who had to teach her classes and write it all afterwards, the additional value of that new side to the project became indispensable. No one realized then how close we were to making something which was very close to western analogues.

Ironically, our new voluntary co-author did not have teaching English as her university specialty. She was an ex-teacher of math who started to teach English due to the shortage of

English teachers, as many schools now had extensive English syllabi! It speaks indirectly in favour of the idea that one does not need to be a good user or knower of the subject matter, neither do they need much talent to be good writers, as long as what they produce is born in the classroom with the sincere desire to help their students to learn.

With such addition to it, the book was in use in the school from 1992 to 1999, but as for myself, I was already far from teaching in the primary or writing for the primary. My involvement with the British Council and other projects made me accept the idea that as a non- native speaking English teacher I will never write anything worth using in class. Besides, by that time I fell in love with teacher training and that was what brought me to Pearson.

The Invasion of Brands

By the end of the 1990s, due to the fall of the Iron Curtain, the activities of different international organizations and the British Council in particular, the doors of Ukrainian schools were practically open for international publishers.

They came with titles already published for other markets in the hope that Ukraine would

162 become a new growing market for their product. So, Pearson, at that time Addison-Wesley

Longman, strived to repeat its Polish success of the late 1990s and regarded Ukraine as its new success story. Oxford had its Ukrainian marketing manager for several years prior to the arrival of other players and the new page in relations between teachers and textbooks began.

With letters from the Ministry which approved of using British coursebooks in schools, provided parents would agree to purchase them for their children, teachers started to introduce authentic (as they called them) textbooks in their classrooms. By that time both schools and parents were used to receiving free textbooks through school libraries and having to buy books for learning was unacceptable for many. Besides, international publishers came not only with brand new titles but also brought those they thought would sell. With the lack of evaluating skill while choosing textbooks for their classes, many teachers would buy not with their eyes but with their ears and were the first to blame if the textbooks they chose did not match their students’ level or actual needs. Today there are multiple publications on how to choose a textbook (see, for example, Tanner & Green, 1998). At the end of the 1990s such lists of criteria for choosing a textbook were scarce, at least in Ukraine.

In 2001, more Ministry regulations followed, and some regulatory letters technically made it impossible for schools to use textbooks published in Russia. Schools faced a dilemma with only two alternatives: either to go for textbooks by Ukrainian authors or start officially using textbooks published by OUP, Longman and other British publishers.

Looking at textbooks published in Ukraine at that time, one can easily see why the decision in many cases were made in favor of British publishers. Here is one example of what was offered in a textbook for Grade 10 by Plakhotnyk, Martynova and Alexandrova (1997) written for teenage students, who theoretically would learn English for five years by then:

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THE FIRST TERM

RECAPITULATION COURSE

Lesson 1

1. Read the text and retell it.

The summer is over, and now I am a pupil of the 10th form. There are many new pupils in

our form. Some of them came from other forms in our school, but some boys and girls

came from other schools. One boy, I know him, came from Lviv. (p. 3)

The text was twice as long as the passage above, but it was clear that the level of the language was not for grade 10, and the types of tasks were typical for Moscow textbooks of the

Soviet era: Read the text and retell it. Answer the questions. Translate into English. Do exercise

2b in 1 minute. The last task was about an exercise which contained two columns of nineteen phrases and sentences: the left one was in English, the right one was in Ukrainian. Students were supposed to cover one side and then translate the phrases and sentences into the other language in one minute. There were about twenty phrases, which meant they were supposed to read and translate one chunk in about three seconds!

Then students, who were supposed to have studied English for five years by then, had to answer the following questions:

What form are you in? [in case they forgot] How old are you? Do you have a sister?

What is her name? How old is she? What is your friend? Is he a teen-ager? When were

you born? Where were you born? Where do you live? (p. 4)

It was clear that textbook production in Ukraine copied the Soviet pattern when textbooks were written by the people who were close to decision makers but very far from real classrooms.

It made the invasion of brands into Ukrainian textbook market fairly easy.

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By the beginning of the 2000s, I stopped teaching full-time and would have about 5 to 6 lessons a week, and those lessons were special subjects like British and American Studies,

Literature in English, Translation. It was because I could not come to the school every day to teach English only, but due to my greater involvement with teachers as a Pearson representative and teacher trainer, I started to see certain patterns in the process of textbook adoption and use when I visited other schools.

The process can be roughly divided into two strands or modes of teachers’ relations with or their attitude to textbooks offered by international publishers: teachers either accepted the new tools for learning, or totally rejected them.

Teachers who adopted British textbooks would also often start with unconditioned belief in the power of the textbook. Such belief could be one result of publishers’ marketing messages, like get-the-book-and-it-will-work-for-you, or real Ukrainian English textbook fatigue and the desire to make a change. Often the adoption would lead to some sort of bewilderment and frustration – maybe I don’t understand how to work with such textbooks! Some would use old university-imposed conscious-comparative ways and that would often lead to more bewilderment and eventually replacement of one textbook for another. In some cases, continuous work with the textbook, frequent participation in seminars and workshops and publishers’ loyalty events would lead teachers to better understanding the philosophy of this or that textbook. That would result in better lessons and students’ better performance.

The other group would start with finding excuses not to bring international textbooks into their classrooms. As a rep, I would often hear statements like, “All British textbooks are the same, only pictures are different” or “You can’t teach English using a magazine, you need something more solid!” or “There are just pictures and dialogues. No texts, no grammar, no

165 serious work!” The doubts of those who adopted the textbooks were often challenged by the chorus from the non-users, “These books do not fit our mentality!”

The compromise for the opponents came form non-English “British” publishers like

Express Publishing or MM. Prodromou and Mishen (2008) write about how Greek authors helped shape the layout and the contents of British coursebooks. Since then, they went further producing books with big texts suitable for reading and translating, and lots of grammar and vocabulary exercises, just what traditional teachers wanted. They did not care much that the cart was still in front of the horse, and that their students were practically trained not to use the language until they learnt it perfectly well. They still wanted to control everything and anything in the classroom.

The arrival of international brands did not change much the general patterns of relationship between teachers and textbooks. Many teachers still preferred to stick to the usual ways of going through texts and studying grammar and vocabulary by translating texts and doing transformation exercises. They just used different teaching tools to go on with the nonsense industry (Smith, 1986) of teaching students how to do exercises of different kind. However, those who were willing to change and who worked hard to understand the principal difference between the methods managing to make their classes skill-oriented, language-focused and useful for their students.

In other words, those who rigidly stuck to the old ways continued to deliver classes which were dull and detached. The availability of international textbooks could only improve classes where teachers managed to change themselves and to change their ways of teaching.

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Before the Curtain Falls

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

To say that during my years in Pearson I stopped teaching would not be completely true.

First, I continued working part time as a teacher in the same school, but I hardly ever used any textbooks, as there were practically no textbooks on British and American Studies, Literature in

English or Translation. There I had to create my own teaching materials which is not that relevant to this research. It never resulted in anything tangible as my activities as a Pearson rep and teaching left practically no time for me to write.

Second, there were cases when I was asked to deliver a lesson based on this or that

Pearson title, and it was then that I had several chances to come into close contacts either with textbooks or teachers and students who were using them in class.

In 2002, a new National Curriculum was launched which ruled that students started learning English in Grade 2 all over Ukraine. It meant that with the sudden growth of the number of teaching hours for English in schools there emerged a growing need in teachers of English.

Many universities started opening foreign language departments where preparing students for teaching was the least concern. It resulted in multiple cases when new and novice teachers were not well prepared for dealing both with students and textbooks. Moreover, the growing demand from parents for English made boards of education open more English classes in schools which had no previous experience in having four or five English classes a week. That was an obvious mismatch between the desired and the real. Some schools that adopted this or that Pearson title would often ask for guidance in their work with new coursebooks and would sometimes ask for assistance in the form of methodological workshops or demo lessons.

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A Day in 2004

During one of my regular school visits as a Pearson rep, a school principal asked if I would agree to deliver a lesson in Grade 5, as he thought his teachers found the textbook insufficient for five hours of English per week. They thought it was too thin with short texts and not enough grammar, which was a usual initial complaint. The principal, being an English teacher himself, also thought that the teachers were going too fast through the book.

Although World Club 1 (Harris & Mower, 2000) was a good choice for the school, I could understand their concern. The main reason for similar complaints was rooted in the post-

Soviet “solid” and “scientific” approach to teaching, which I referred to before and which was still the only one accepted by many universities: reading and translating texts, doing exercises and completely ignoring pair or group work, model writing, projects and other communicative activities. School teachers were often simply unaware of other ways to teach. The good thing about the whole situation was that they were ready to learn themselves.

We talked to the teachers who worked in Grades 5, agreed on the closest date possible and on the pages which I should use, as we did not want to disrupt the logical flow of the classes.

Thus, we chose Fluency section of Module 6 Villages. It read:

Fluency

Writing: Description of a village

A In pairs or groups, invent and write about a village.

Stage 1: Preparation

Look at the table. Then copy and complete it with information for your village.

Name: Bigwig

Location: Scotland, near the sea

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Places: supermarket, bank, park…

Tourist Attractions: castle, church

Festivals: ice-cream festival (August) ice-cream statues

People: Mrs. Brice (teacher), Mr. McDonald (fisherman)

Sate 2: Writing.

Write about your village and some of the people. Divide the work between you.

Examples:

Our village is called Bigwig and it is in Scotland. It is near the sea and it has got…

Julia is a teacher in the local school. She loves…

Stage 3: Checking and presentation

Check your work for punctuation, spelling and grammar. Make a poster. Draw the village

neatly and include your descriptions. (Harris & Mower, 2000, p. 64)

Later, when I looked more attentively at the page, I realized how the material could be unpacked, and that one lesson might not be enough, if I wanted to show all stages of preparing students for the final task. So, I called the school and asked if I could have a double class with the same students and received a definite “Yes!”.

While preparing for the lesson, I decided to take only Part A, which took one half of the page. I thought of broadening the preparation stage, which had suggestions on the name of the village, location, places in the village, tourist attractions, festivals and people. I also meant to adapt the writing stage but limit my additional teaching aids to those that seemed available and easy to make (see Figure 4). I also wanted to provide sufficient visual and verbal support to the students in their attempts to speak.

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Figure 4. Self-made prompts to scaffold students’ speaking.

There was one thing though that I did not expect. The teacher had split the students into three groups of four prior to the lesson, and although I wanted to have random groups, I had to agree to her choice of the groups. She had made the groups according to the students’ abilities: one group comprised top students, the second one consisted of less able but diligent students, and the last one was made up exclusively of boys, who were supposed to be less reliable as learners, as their teacher said. I must say that it turned out to be unexpectedly interesting later. I do not remember how we justified my teacher’s role to the kids, but they accepted me quite well, and we began.

After we introduced one another and had a small talk on the weather and the surroundings, I asked a question, which would lead us all to the final product, the written description of an invented village, “Would you like to live in a village?”

As you may reasonably assume, all students diligently said “Yes”; all but one boy, who came up with a definite “No!”

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That was the moment every teacher should anticipate and be ready to use in any class!

Such moments create real reasons for communication, and I instantly grabbed the opportunity,

“Why not?”

“There’s nothing there”, said the boy, one of that disruptive group. “Nothing to do, nowhere to go. Boring.” (I surely helped him articulate those ideas, but the conversation flowed quite smoothly with everyone understanding the main things).

“And what if you could build your own village? What would you have there?” I asked turning to the whole group.

That was where, thanks to that boy’s opposing idea, I gave it the starting push with the ice completely broken and kids willing to participate in the discussion.

I do not know what I would have done if they all had said “Yes!” but I think it would be more challenging for me to make the students willing to share. It is always easier to maintain the logical flow of any lesson, if ideas are different, although many teachers still want uniformity.

I offered to look at the book to see what it is like to describe a village and here I used my verbal and visual sheets (Figure 4) to help them talk about the village presented in the textbook. I had to take the descriptions further by shaping the characters of the people mentioned in the book and providing more ideas to describe them. In fact, we were revising the language they would need to do the bigger thing – writing about their villages, and I still wanted to go further than that.

So, we described the village in the book and its attractions, events and people. I would ask them to it with and without looking at the page in the textbook, and in other different modes, until I felt it was time to stop revising previously learnt material. Then I changed the mode of interaction and asked four students from different groups to come up to the board and summarize

171 what we previously said about Bigwig, the village in the book. After they did that using my prompts, I said that they just showed how they would present their own projects to the whole class (and to the teachers present) later. It was the time to go to the next stage.

After a ten-minute break I told them that they should invent and write about their imaginary villages and present them as a group to the rest of the class. As there were four students in each group, I offered to share parts of the projects within their groups having each student responsible for a particular part of the description: one would work on the location, another on places and attractions, and two of them would develop at least two people living in the village, just as I had on my hand-made posters. I also said that I would not interfere with the process but would help with the language if they needed that. However, the first stage here was group discussion, and with their own imaginary places in mind, they started to brainstorm on the location of their future villages, their people, attractions, buildings and the like. I moved around the class to monitor the process.

Here, interesting things began to happen. The group of “least able” students, the boys’ group, quickly get down to discussing the details and distributing responsibilities and with little encouragement and help with vocabulary or grammar they went on working. When I came to the group with “most able” students, they asked if they could invent four separate villages each. As one of the main ideas was for them to learn to work with others while doing one project, I softly said “No!” and spent some time helping them to accept the idea. When I finally got to the middle group with “diligent” ones, I saw they had problems, as nothing was on the sheets of paper that I gave to them. They did not have anything on the rough copies either. Then they said that they could not agree on the name of their village and could not go on with the whole thing! Gradually all the groups were doing what they had to do, and that was the least “spectacular” part of the

172 lesson, as the students were busy discussing and writing.

Not surprisingly, the boys group finished first and I had to ask them to rehearse the presentation in their group before presenting, as I wanted the other two groups to finish theirs. I assumed the two other groups would have less difficulty in presenting their work, while the

“least able” students, who finished first needed time to practice.

When the presentation stage began, I helped them to stick their separate posters on the board, so the posters looked like one, and so the students could look at them and read what they had written if needed. The presentations went well, and the students, even those who experienced some problems of misunderstanding in their groups when they could not agree on some things, enjoyed the performance stage. I noticed that they also listened rather attentively to what other students were saying.

After a short whole class discussion on their experience, I assigned homework for them, which was putting all their group’s ideas together and writing about the village they invented in their group. There, they started copying what the other students in their groups had written, and after some time the lesson was over.

When the children left, I briefly explained why I planned the lesson like I did, how the

Teacher’s Book helped in giving some ideas, e.g. “If they are working in groups, get each student to write about one particular area” (Harris, Mower, Musiol, 2000, p. 71), why I extended some areas to introduce more facts about the people in Bigwig, etc. I also explained how such group work on projects helped students learn to think, make decisions, compromise, take a lead, work in teams, present their work and at the same time use all four linguistic skills in a realistic environment.

The teachers’ feedback was positive as, on the one hand, I was a kind of authority to

173 them and, on the other hand, they did see something in the lesson they did not think of doing before. So, one teacher said that she did not think the children needed visual or verbal support, as she thought that having pictures or model phrases in the book was enough. Another said she did not revise previously learnt material, as she assumed students should be able to retain it. They also said they did not think, that those Fluency sections in the book could be expanded so they would take more than one lesson. They were also surprised at how the boys’ group worked during the lesson.

In return, I also said that I envied them a little, because they were teaching with good textbooks at hand, whereas at our time, about twenty years ago, we did not have anything like that. I also said I enjoyed working with their students, as they seemed to use English better than my fifth-graders some fifteen years ago. I was sincere as I really saw the difference in students’ ability to communicate more freely than mine could. I again referred it to different understanding of how languages should be taught and to the difference in the quality of the textbooks in use.

That remained one of my most memorable days as a Pearson teacher trainer, for I saw that my words and my actions resonated with those young teachers, and that my efforts were not in vain.

Back on the Track

The multiple perspective of those years gave me the possibility to analyze why some textbooks were easy to fit into schools and some, even international bestsellers, were not, why some textbooks were easy to work with in class and some were unfortunately useless.

While some teachers did not see much difference between textbooks, they were in fact different. Some were easy to follow, some were not. Some were easy to extend and adapt, some were not. Some provided good coverage and practice in grammar and vocabulary, some did not.

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Some looked like a good lesson outline, some just provided information. I also saw why some titles were more popular than others. So, the most successful Pearson titles of the early 2000s were Opportunities (Harris, Mower, Sikorzynska, 2001) for high school and Friends (Skinner &

Bogucka, 2002) for upper-secondary school, as they both had been piloted in Eastern European countries including Ukraine and received piloting teachers’ feedback before publishing.

Later, my experience in trying various textbooks for teaching helped me to come up with my own preferred structure of a textbook when I had to write one.

During all those years, local publishers also produced numerous textbooks for all types of schools. Those textbooks were far behind their international rivals in both language and methodological input, but they had two principal advantages. First, they were provided at no cost to schools and, second, they were officially recommended by the Ministry of Education. They mainly followed the so-called post-Soviet methodology with focus on grammar and vocabulary, but that was what many working teachers could understand and accept.

Another important feature of those textbooks was reference to Ukrainian topics, which was part of the National Curriculum and international publishers could only offer “now-write- about-your-country” types of tasks (Pulverness, 2003). The mismatch, however innocent it might seem, could indicate the mere substitution of once dominating Moscow (or Russian) ideology by now fashionable Western one. Following the Ministry requirements and trying to maintain their market shares, international publishers started to produce Ukraine-specific workbooks or components (see, for example, Falla & Davis, 2008). Most of those were written by Ukrainian authors, and although they still in many ways followed the straightforward traditional approach, it meant that local ELT authors came onto stage. As in Fahrenheit 451, “Things began to have mass” (Bradbury, 2008, p. 47).

175

Things Getting Mass

With English being taught in all grades in Ukraine, the production of EFL textbooks these days seems to be rather market-driven or Ministry-driven than academy-driven.

The Ministry of Education of Ukraine issues a broad list of textbooks recommended for use in schools. The list comprises textbooks by both local and international publishers and is updated every year. There are two parts in the list. The first part comprises basic or staple textbooks written exclusively by Ukrainian authors. These textbooks are free for schools and students. However, if students need other components like workbooks or the listening program for the course, they have to buy them. The second part gives the list of recommended titles.

These include textbooks of Ukrainian authors that are not found in the first part, and all international coursebooks approved for use in schools of Ukraine. The textbooks from the second part of the list are usually purchased by students’ parents, if they agree to do so. School authorities usually go for the staple part of the recommended list, even if the textbooks offered are of poor quality and receive negative feedback from teachers and students. The textbooks often deserve such feedback, as most of them are rather similar in both content and approaches.

Although it seems almost impossible to evaluate present teacher-textbook relationships due to the great variety of textbooks offered for schools, the main trends or outcomes are not hard to trace.

The abundance time seems to be no different from the time-of-no-choice. Teachers still have to omit, replace, add and adapt (Grant, 1987) textbook lessons as they have always done.

The focus, however, for many EFL teachers remains grammar and vocabulary; this is what they look for in a textbook in the first place. While there is nothing wrong with that, as grammar always defined the sequence of linguistic input in any textbook, teachers often regard it as their

176 goal without taking language classes further to developing students’ non-linguistic skills, characteristics and attitudes. Many still think in the frames of textbooks they use.

The Final Touch

This story of my relationship with textbooks is coming to an end. I decided to stop here not because I stopped teaching, learning, or dealing with textbooks. I am about to put a full stop, because as a non-native English-speaking teacher of English I seem to have found answers to those questions that still bring up hot debates of whether teachers should or should not use textbooks in their classrooms. Although I can agree that the materials teachers may produce for their classes may achieve short term goals, but I doubt whether they are a good substitute for a lesson-driven textbook, which is written with students and teachers in mind “from the back of the classroom” (West, 1960, p. 74).

Another reason to stop here is in the continuous flow of stories, where one story can emerge from another and lead to a new one, with each story contributing to the bigger picture of language teaching and learning.

When I started this research, I did not know that at times it would lead me to the areas I was not even thinking of visiting. I have found some areas, which are still undeveloped and almost blank, and I have come to confirm my inner belief, that good textbooks are as scarce as good books, because all of us can talk but very few can write something, which is read with pleasure.

I also decided not to touch upon my latest experience of a textbook writer, as it is not completely related to the topic of relationship between a working teacher and their textbooks.

Maybe some day someone will write about their experience of teaching with Across Ukraine

(Chebotaryov, 2014, 2015), but that will be a different story.

177

Chapter 5

Analyzing That

“…Our representations cannot be understood as unassailable…”

Dauphinee (2010, p. 810)

It is hard to avoid opinion-based conclusions while analyzing your findings, especially when you write about educational practices through autoethnographic lens (Wall, 2008). It is hard when your experience and perception put you in the position, which is highly vulnerable to criticism from practically all sides: academy, educational authorities, professional community or a wider public.

This research shows certain critical findings, which may well be considered in future while working on a similar topic. They refer to both the classification and the argumentation used throughout the long history of textbook research.

1 Terminology

The comparatively narrow term textbook and the much broader one teaching materials seem equally insufficient as for the accuracy of their meanings. It is the lack of accuracy in terminology used in the area of textbook research that leads to mismatches and misunderstandings. Such lack of accuracy often creates confusion in the minds of working teachers and often hinders or misleads researchers in the areas of content, production and consumption (Harwood, 2014). When researchers, teachers or public refer to textbooks, they often mean different things.

2 Textbooks in Classrooms

With insufficient data on how textbooks are used in the EFL classroom, conclusions are often made based on findings from areas other than teaching and learning English as a foreign

178 language (Harwood, 2014; Jarc, 2015).

Textbooks can improve teaching as well as they can also hamper teaching. Textbook use depends on the realistic and adequate reaction to situations of learning, which can be managed by a teacher with or without help from their students. The efficiency of textbook use depends on how well teacher literacy and teacher skills are developed in a particular person, or how they are encouraged and enhanced in a particular school.

With teacher literacy and skills being a high priority in class, it appears that the textbook is not central to teaching, although many novice teachers and those who are far from the classroom think so. However, whereas it is not central, it is still one important element, which should help teachers to teach and students to learn.

The uniqueness of a concrete teaching situation does not automatically mean that the teacher can go without a textbook. The thing is not whether a textbook in use is officially approved or not. The principal thing, however, is how exactly a textbook is used by teachers and students in and out of the classroom.

Existing assumptions about common teaching approaches related to concrete teaching situations and teaching materials tend to be false. Most advice on teachers’ dealing with textbooks is based on the assumption that teachers know how to teach, that they can easily identify textbook activities that are not suitable for their classroom situation, that they understand their students’ needs, help them meet those needs, and that they can construct a lesson based on academically grounded or revised principles. However, this is not always happening, and the textbook activities teachers often omit or replace are the most useful ones regarding language development. We also assume that what we write, develop, produce as teaching materials for our classes is clear and understandable. They may be understandable for us, as materials writers

179 and/or developers, but it may not be clear for students, who often struggle to decode the author’s messages, or to make sense of a certain activity, or to find meaning in what they are asked to do in the classroom.

Much of language teaching is experiential, as teachers – especially novice teachers – often teach by trial and error. There is not a single agreed-on sequence of steps or techniques for successful teaching. Teaching can be brought to a certain academically grounded patterns in the frames of a concrete school or college, only if there is a shared desire to work towards the same goal of educating students. In such schools, teachers are free to choose their textbooks.

Textbooks should not be mandatory.

3 Teachers and Textbooks

A novice teacher’s story of their relationship with textbooks begins with their total belief in the power of the textbook they use. If the textbook fits their understanding of teaching, they may be content with what they have and rely on the textbook in their work. If there is a mismatch, or if the textbook makes students bored, teachers may start to have doubts. They can look for alternatives, if there are any, and some can make a match.

Those who do not have an alternative for their textbook try to make the most of it by adapting, changing, omitting and replacing. This takes time, and teachers may go on to master their understanding of lesson procedure and learning about how to teach, about methods in action. As they go, they may try their hand at writing their own teaching materials, explore resource books offering various classroom activities and tasks, which are often unrelated to the curriculum, so teachers adapt them to their students’ needs. They assume the tasks will work, try them in class, have more doubts if they do not, and start again to have more doubts. Eventually their efforts yield fruit. They learn how to make lessons engaging by developing criteria for a

180 good language lesson. With this new understanding, they may start looking for a textbook, which will match those criteria and learn to tell a good textbook from a mediocre one.

The textbook, however good or bad it may be, will not provide everything teachers may think of, and teachers will need to adapt textbooks to their classroom needs and/or to the needs of their students. No textbook will work, unless you do, but nothing irritates a working teacher more than those textbook writers whose textbooks teachers need to constantly repair.

4 On Textbook Writers

Spending time in a classroom does not make one a teacher, as much as having written a textbook does not make one a textbook writer. Writing a good textbook takes a lot of time most teachers do not have. It also requires writing skills many teachers do not have.

The general assumption is that textbook writers are themselves experienced teachers, who know well enough what to teach, when and how. It is also assumed, that they can write well, or in other words, they are writers by nature or by trade. The majority believe that myth.

The reality is that not all material writers are experienced teachers. Many of them have insufficient or very little or even no classroom experience at all. Even if they have it, it does not always mean that they do not profess traditional front-of-the-class approach.

Many of textbook writers assume that as long as they know the language, or the foreign language, they can write in it. However, teaching and creative writing are two different skills, and as a result of such assumptions we have textbooks that are bland, unemotional, encyclopaedic and boring. Authors often assume it is not necessary to understand a classroom situation, and it is enough to imagine it, hence unrealistic or imagined tasks. It is the work of such textbook writers that is severely criticized by academy and public.

There are textbooks which are well written, as well as there are textbooks which are

181 badly written. There are not many good fiction or non-fiction writers. There are much more mediocre ones. There are very few good textbook writers. Textbooks are often written by people, who are close to publishing or educational authorities.

Textbooks should be written with an average learner in mind. However, average does not mean mediocre, or retarded, or less able, or bear any other negative connotation. The language in which a textbook is written should be as comprehensible as possible.

Textbooks should be written with a learner in mind. Many textbooks are written with the author in mind. Many textbooks are written with the subject matter in mind. Some are written with research and experiment in mind. More and more are written with profit in mind. Many local textbook writers still share the values of traditional methods of teaching foreign languages.

When global textbooks influence teaching methods or curricula in local contexts, it may mean that (1) local textbooks fail to do so, and (2) the local educational authorities let them do it.

Besides, very often, global textbooks are just better written. It also means that with the comparatively easy access to good examples of global textbooks, local textbook writers have fewer and fewer excuses when their textbooks come under criticism.

5 On Textbook Criticism

Textbooks are written by few and criticized by many. It is easier to produce argumentative criticism than to write a good textbook. The role of textbooks in English language teaching and learning goes beyond the debate between supporters and skeptics of textbook use.

As teachers in general come under criticism based on the examples of bad teaching, similarly textbooks in general are often criticized based on the examples of bad textbooks. Then the whole problem of the textbook is not about resisting or rejecting all textbooks, but rather resisting bad ones, which are unfortunately plentiful. All textbooks can be divided into two main

182 groups: textbooks that are lesson- or activity-based and textbooks that are information- and/or exercise-based.

The lesson-based textbooks provide ideas for organizing and conducting a lesson with each step either provided or suggested. The language material is arranged so that the lessons and modules should flow logically with gradual growth in difficulty for students. Exercises in grammar and vocabulary are there to support communication or work on or repair language areas, which are hard to understand and need more attention due to other reasons, like divergence with students’ mother tongue. Such textbooks usually take a long time to write and publish.

The other, a much more numerous group, comprises textbooks which are written without much understanding of what language lessons are like. It is typical of those textbooks to have excessive topic-related vocabulary and sporadic and unrelated groups of tasks which are often not suitable for classroom work. Textbooks in this category are written and published fast – usually to unrealistic deadlines – with the aim to fill a gap in the Ministry list of recommended titles or in the hope of winning textbook grants from the government or to win a market share. It is these textbooks that receive bad publicity and come under criticism.

In Soviet and post-Soviet contexts of teaching English as a foreign language in Ukraine, best textbooks for teaching English to learners of different age groups were written not thanks to the existing system of textbook production, but in spite of it.

The existence of “some special body set up for the purpose” (West, 1960, p. 75) may solve the problem of textbooks availability, but does not solve the problem of textbook quality, and consequently lesson quality. When the same people formulate educational policy, have authority to write curricula, set criteria for textbook production and eventually write them or/and evaluate them, they create a situation when textbooks, which are written far from real

183 classrooms, will not match teachers’ or students’ expectations.

As long as we cannot eliminate textbooks from classrooms – as they do assist in teaching and learning – we have to work towards the situation when textbooks are written from the back of the classroom (West, 1960) and are created with teachers and students in mind.

Textbooks should not be resisted but changed into real tools of learning. The war should be waged not on textbook-driven lessons or textbooks (Thornbury, 2000, 2013), but on bland and mediocre textbooks and on mediocrity in the classroom.

6 On Mutual Responsibility

It is easier to find flaws in textbooks than to identify and repair faults between the quality of teaching materials and (educational) institutions responsible for textbook production: educational authorities, special academic boards, academia in general, teacher training institutions, publishers, teachers, general public. All of these (i.e. us) tend to live and work in their/our own limited areas of responsibility with teachers and students often having to take care of the teaching and learning process and eventual results themselves. Teachers – and students – alone should not be made solely responsible for developing teaching or self-teaching materials.

Although the research is set in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Ukraine, the trends of having “centrally generated textbooks” (West, 1960, p. 76) seems to be typical for many parts of the world. In such cases, there is very little real teachers’ feedback on the textbooks they have to use in their classrooms. Teachers vote for or against a particular textbook in many different ways, but those ways remain to a large extent an individual or institutional matter, without going to any serious level of discussion.

We should admit that language learning textbooks, as well as textbooks on other subjects, are not written for those students who want to read them, but for all students who must read

184 them. That is why textbooks should be written even better than usual books for students of all ages. Textbooks have larger audiences by default. It is mutual responsibility of different agents in and around education to oppose mediocrity in both textbook production and classroom practices.

7 Looking ahead

I once heard an older colleague say, “We don’t teach languages, we teach people”, and in the same way we do not teach by textbooks, we teach using them.

At a certain point you understand, that your classes and the textbooks you are using do not only help develop your students’ linguistic skills, but also help form their identities, and there should be something more than just subject matter in the textbook. You start to realize that however little your influence on students might be – as long as peer pressure, community pressure, family background and other forms of social and cultural milieu shape your students’ personalities with more consistency and magnitude – it is still worth showing students different aspects of life – not just school subjects – during those classroom interactions called lessons. Just words from a teacher often mean little, as different teachers tend to use similar words and express similar ideas while talking to their students, who get used to hearing similar things all the time and often just stop listening. They may open a textbook from time to time, and the textbook should be skillfully written, and the material should be skillfully presented, so it could fit not only certain teaching style but also address the utmost challenges of today’s life.

There is still hope that one day someone may set to write that type of textbook which will go beyond the classroom and beyond the subject it intends to teach. That textbook will be about local, national and global issues. It will be about core values and immediate challenges, and it will shape students’ – and teachers’ – identities in a different way.

185

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Other books used in the paper:

The Essays of Francis Bacon by Sir Francis Bacon.

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare.

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner… by Daniel

Defoe.

The Surprising Adventures of Baron Münchhausen by Rudolf Erich Raspe (expanded by

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Flow: The Psychology of optimal experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.