Lesson F - Everyday English focuses on linguistic functions, includes a listening task with speakers of different accents and regional dialects
Lesson G - Writing focuses on one of the text types required for the school-leaving exam
Each unit is followed by either a Get ready for your exam or a Language review / Skills round-up section. Get ready for your exam provides specific school-leaving exam tasks, and at the same time offers more practice for the language from the previous units. Language review / Skills round-up recaps the content of the preceding units through the story of a Czech boy living in Britain. Additionally, four Get ready for B2 exams sections are also included in the coursebook, providing students with more advanced practice exercises.
On the whole, the intermediate level of Solutions also sets out to cover a broad range of the components of communicative competence. Despite the fact that its primary stated aim is to prepare students for the school-leaving exams, the coursebook offers a rich variety of task and text types, aiming at developing different aspects of the language. Furthermore, it also makes efforts to include sociocultural information and language functions.
analysis of the proportion of the three types of language practice, mechanical, meaningful and communicative practice (Gómez-Rodriguez, 2010; Richards, 2005), as described in Chapter 4.
To be able to assign the coursebook activities to the categories indicated in the previous paragraph, certain guidelines were adhered to. The three types of practice covered the following task types:
mechanical practice: grammar study, drills, repetitions, gap fills, matching exercises, sentence transformations, act out dialogues
meaningful practice: gap fills, matching exercises, questions, multiple choice tasks, true/false tasks, sentence formation, information transfer
communicative practice: open questions, dialogues, situational role plays, presentations, free writing tasks
With reference to mechanical practice and meaningful practice activities, gap fills and matching exercises were considered to be meaningful practice when presented in context. For instance, a short gapped text, in which verbs had to be put in the appropriate tense, was considered to be meaningful practice, as opposed to isolated sentences with gaps to be filled in.
Figure 3 provides a sample table used for the analysis, containing the results of the evaluation of New English File from this respect.
Figure 3 Sample table showing the results of the different types of practices in New English File (PE=Practical English, W=Writing, R/C= Revise & Check, TB=Teacher’s Book)
Originally, it was my intention to analyse the content of the student’s book together with the workbook and other supplementary materials. However, the results of the analysis of the workbook significantly distorted the global percentages. It was indicated in the description of each of the three coursebooks that the accompanying workbooks were originally intended for individual study and home assignments, for instance.
Consequently, it seemed logical that the proportion of communicative activities was extremely low. The coursebook activities contained mechanical and meaningful activities in a relatively balanced proportion.
Since the original focus of the research was to explore the way the components of communicative competence were addressed in the language classroom, the inclusion of the workbooks in the analysis was decided against. The results of the analysis and the proportion of mechanical, meaningful and communicative activities, presented in Table 6, were based on the activities of the student’s book, and the supplementary materials included in the accompanying teacher’s book.
Table 6 The proportion of types of practice in the three evaluated units of the coursebook series (number of tasks and percentages)
COURSEBOOK UNIT MECHANICAL
PRACTICE
MEANINGFUL PRACTICE
COMMUNICATIVE PRACTICE
New English File
no. 36 27 37
3 % 36.0% 27.0% 37.0%
no. 21 32 51
4 % 20.2% 30.8% 49.0%
no. 25 36 35
6 % 26.0% 37.5% 36.5%
no. 82 95 123
∑ % 27.3% 31.7% 41.0%
New Headway
no. 18 11 9
3 % 47.4% 28.9% 23.7%
no. 17 11 13
7 % 41.5% 26.8% 31.7%
no. 14 12 11
12 % 37.9% 32.4% 29.7%
no. 49 34 33
∑ % 42.3% 29.3% 28.4%
Solutions
no. 10 27 17
2 % 18.5% 50.0% 31.5%
no. 8 23 18
4 % 16.3% 46.9% 36.8%
no. 8 27 18
7 % 15.1% 50.9% 34.0%
no. 26 77 53
∑ % 16.7% 49.4% 33.9%
The results of the analysis indicated the predominance of communicative activities (41.0%) in the case of the intermediate New English File. This number confirmed the authors’ stated aims, claiming that New English File was an essentially
communicative coursebook, focusing on real-life communication. Considering the more controlled task types, the proportion of mechanical and meaningful activities was relatively balanced, 27.3% and 31.7%, respectively. A closer look at the results of the individual units, however, revealed that there was considerable variation between the units.
The intermediate New Headway also proved to be what it had promised: a grammar-oriented coursebook. The majority of the activities (42.3%) pertained to the mechanical practice category, with 29.3% of the tasks being meaningful practice, and 28.4% being communicative practice. Additionally, the proportion of the three types of practice was relatively stable throughout the book.
Since New English File and New Headway had clearly indicated their preferences in the introductory section of the teacher’s book with regard to ELT methodology, the proportion of the three types of practice throughout the coursebooks did not come as a surprise. With regard to the proportion of the types of practice in the Solutions coursebook, however, before the analysis I was in the dark. The results showed that nearly half of the exercises (49.4%) belonged to the meaningful practice category, with communicative practice ranking second (33.9%) and mechanical practice scoring the lowest (16.7%).
The calculated ratios of the different practice types in the Solutions coursebook seem to be in accordance with the structure and activities of the school-leaving exam.
The predominance of meaningful activities reflect the task types of the Reading, Listening and Use of English papers of the exam, which are mostly controlled tasks in a meaningful context. To sum up, the proportions of mechanical, meaningful and communicative practice activities seem to be in accordance with the stated aims of the coursebooks.