Jacobs, G. M., Crookall, D., & Thiyaragarajali, R. (1997). The evolution of group activities in ELT coursebooks. Folio, 4(2), 21-24.

Changes happen frequently in second language education (Harmer, 1991; Hopkins, 1994) due in part to changes which take place in related fields, such as psychology, linguistics, first language education, and second language acquisition. Other forces that encourage change include social, economic, and technological transformations, as well as shifts in the overall zeitgeist. Coursebooks reflect these ongoing changes in pedagogy.

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has been one of the deeper and more far reaching changes that have taken place over the last half century in second language education (Richards & Rodgers, 1986). The advent of CLT, approximately in the 1970s, represented a trend away from approaches which emphasize rote drills or the teaching of discrete points of grammar in a decontextualized manner. Instead, in CLT, the emphasis is on meaningful communication with others. The thinking behind this change toward CLT is described in detail elsewhere (e.g., Brown, 1994, Richards & Rodgers, 1986).

Because group activities allow and promote meaningful communication, they feature prominently in CLT materials. Long and Porter (1985) described five reasons for the use of groups in second language instruction:

1. greater quantity of student talk

2. greater variety of speech acts used by students

3. more individualization of instruction

4. more positive affective climate

5. enhanced motivation.

In the present study, we examined two possible changes over time in coursebooks used in second language education: the presence and nature of group activities. In order to see if the advent of CLT was reflected in the design of coursebooks, we formulated the following two null hypotheses:

1. Group activities would not be more common in coursebooks for second language instruction written after CLT came to prominence.

2. Group activities involving communication would be no more common in coursebooks written after CLT came to prominence.

METHOD

To test the hypotheses, we examined ELT coursebooks from before and after the advent of CLT. For this purpose, they used the Online Public Access Catalogue, a computerized search tool, at the SEAMEO Regional Language Centre’s large library to gather titles of ELT coursebooks published on the international market from two periods: 1950-1967 (pre-communicative) and 1993-1996 (communicative). The earlier period encompassed many more years in order to provide a roughly equal number of titles from which to select. A table of random numbers enabled the random selection of ten coursebooks from each period. Coursebooks were not considered if they were mainly for self-study, did not have exercises/activities, or if one from the same author or series had already been selected.

The selected coursebooks were examined for the presence of group activities and, if present, whether the group activities involved real communication. Quantity of group activities was not considered. For instance, if a book had one group activity, it was classified as having group activities. Most coursebooks follow a fairly regular unit/lesson format; thus, if a book has a group activity in one unit/lesson, group activities are likely to appear in all units/lessons.

A group activity was operationally defined as an activity which is to be done by a subset of the class consisting of two or more students who interact principally with each other, not with the teacher. If coursebook directions were not clear to the researchers, the coursebook introduction or teachers manual was consulted, when these were available. Real communication was loosely and somewhat weakly defined as any time when students are asked to supply their own ideas, rather than repeating language supplied by the coursebook, even if this involves choosing from a number of options to fill a slot.

An example of an activity coded as "group - not communicative" appears in English: Your new language (Benardo & Pantell, 1967). Each unit has two dialogues, which are to be exploited using the following procedure: (1) the teacher reads and explains; (2) the teacher takes one role and the class the other; (3) half the class reads one role and the other half the other; (4) students repeat the lines in pairs. Another example of a group activity not considered communicative in this study came from the well-known English 900 series (English Language Services, 1964). Here, each unit has group activities in the form of substitution drills, e.g., student A has the model sentence, "Would you like an appointment for Thursday?" and student B has "No, I’m sorry. I can come any time except Thursday (p. 85)." The book supplies student A with a series of words to substitute for Thursday, such as next Monday and B with words to substitute for except Thursday, such as with the exception of next Monday.

After joint discussion of several of the coursebooks, inter-rater agreement for coding the coursebooks on the two variables was established by having each book coded at different times by two people. Inter-rater agreement was 100%. Probability analysis (Kurtz & Mayo, 1979) was used to test the two hypotheses with the alpha level set at .05.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Results of the study are shown in Table 1. Significantly more of the coursebooks from the communicative period have groups activities (p>.002), and significantly more of the recent coursebooks have communicative group activities (p>.00001). Indeed, all of the recent coursebooks have communicative group activities. Thus, the two null hypotheses were rejected.

The results of the current study do not mean that in the 1950s-1960s communicative group activities were never used in second language instruction or coursebooks, or that in the 1990s all teachers and all coursebooks organize students into communicative groups. First, the books used in this study are only a small sample of all the books published in these periods. Second, a gap may exist between what appears in coursebooks and what happens in classroom (Maley, 1995). For instance, teachers have voiced several concerns about the use of group activities in second language education (Rodgers, 1988), including loss of control, extensive first language use, and internalization by students of each other’s errors. Such concerns may lead teachers to disregard directions to use groups. Further, some of the non-group, non-communication activities in books from the earlier period could be easily modified or extended to involve real communication in groups. Indeed, real communication is encouraged in some activities in the books from the earlier period. For example, each unit in Benardo and Pantell (1967) has a series of meaningful questions, such as "When should a married woman get a job?". However, these appear intended for communication between the teacher and the class, rather than among students.

Although predictions often prove wrong, we predict that group activities will be a feature of second language education for many years to come, because communication has established itself as the prime purpose of learning another language, and groups provide a ready forum for practicing and developing communication skills and fluency. Thus, the overall CLT paradigm may continue to be dominant. Indeed, additional language education objectives (e.g., teaching of thinking skills) and means (e.g., computers) seem to reinforce or at least enable an emphasis on communication.

The robustness of the CLT paradigm allows it to accommodate a wide variety of methodologies and educational objectives. This variety manifests itself in the broad range of group activities types found in coursebooks (Crookall & Oxford, 1990; Jacobs & Ball, 1996; Johnson, et al., 1993; Pica, et al., 1993). These variables in group activities deserve continued attention and research from the overlapping communities of researchers and classroom practitioners. Another area for future research would be a focus on the coursebooks written or used in a single country or institution, rather than, as in this study, on coursebooks designed for the international market.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors thank Ng Chen Wee, Assistant Librarian at the Library and Information Centre, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization Regional Language Centre, Singapore, for her assistance with the computer search conducted as part of this study and Fong Cheng Hong for her assistance with the data analysis.

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COURSEBOOKS

Benardo, L. U., & Pantell, D.F. (1967). English: your new language (Book 2). Morristown, NJ: Silver Burdett.

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Glendinning, E H., & Glendinning N. (1995). Oxford English for electrical and mechanical engineering. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hamolsky, S.L. (1960). Improve your English conversation (2nd ed.). New York: American Book Company.

Imber, B.P., & Parker M. G. (1993). Integrated lessons: Pronunciation and grammar. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.

Lado, R., & Fries, C.C. (1957). English sentence patterns: Understanding and producing English gramatical structures. An oral approach. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

National Council of Teachers of English. (1964). English for today: The way we live (Book 3). New York: McGraw Hill.

Nunan, D. (1995). Atlas: Learning-centered communication (Book 1). Boston: Heinle & Heinle.

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Radice, F. (1993). Banking transactions. London: Macmillan.

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Vannufflel, P., Power, P., Palim J., & Oxenden C. (1994). Crackerjack 1. Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Nelson.