Understanding Teachers' Frustration with ELT Materials

Language teaching materials sometimes cause frustration to the user. This very much depends on two factors: how self-reliantly the teacher approaches textbooks and how flexible the textbook is. In 1981, when Allwright wrote his scathing article about the coursebook, he believed that language learning materials could only 'embody decisions, but they cannot themselves undertake action' (p. 9). Being simply a lifeless object, the textbook has been viewed as the tyrant within the classroom (Williams, 1983), demanding that teachers and learners conform to it with no room for deviation or personalisation on either's part. O'Neill (1982) offers an expanded view by stating that despite the broadness or narrowness of it, the essential language components present in a coursebook should allow for applicability in most situations with most students. The main purposes of materials, arguably, are: to maintain quality of education and to standardise instruction (Richards, 2001); to keep 'order within potential chaos' (Hutchinson & Torres, 1994: 327) by providing structure; and to reassure students that structure is present (Harmer, 1998; O'Neill, 1982).

Critics have pointed out that commercially viable coursebooks tend to aim for a gainful target market. Serving a profit-making industry, they eventually become a 'compromise between the financial and the pedagogical' (Sheldon, 1987, 1988). While trying to appeal to everyone everywhere in every language-learning situation (Cunningsworth, 1984; McGrath, 2002), the textbook ends up being too broad to be interesting and relevant. As Dat (2006) elaborates, 'since coursebooks reflect the writer's knowledge and view of the world, when they are transferred and used by people whom the writer knows little about, irrelevance of content and subject matters are likely to result' (p. 52). Other scholars who touched on such irrelevance in materials (Edge & Wharton, 1998; Hutchinson, 1987; Jolly & Bolitho, 1998; Murray, 2003) have noted that although coursebook writers may not be consciously aware of their own beliefs, these individual views still permeate the book in both content and organisation of activities.