Written by

Gökçe KURT 3205970049

Müge AKINÖNDER 3205970066

Şükran GÜVENÇ 3205970097

Mine AKKAY 3205970098

İstanbul Üniversitesi

Hasan Ali Yücel Eğitim Fakültesi

İngilizce Öğretmenliği

EVALUATION OF OPEN DOORS

PREFACE and ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Course Books are accepted to be one of the most crucial materials for a teacher in her/his teacher’s career. For this reason making such a research helped us to be closer to the teaching procedure itself, the used materials and their aplication in the classes. We have the chance to see how those work out, what advantages and disadvantages they can bring us.

We want to thank to our lecturer, Ms. Yavuz, for giving us the opportunity to dicover about the importance of the Course Books. We should not either forget to thank her for rendering us the chance to work together in a group and find out the unbelievable pleasure of sharing the delightful times, difficulties and responsibilities of such an assignment. Special thanks to our families for giving us support in every step of our research and to our close friends for encouranging us in the most hopeless moments.

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgement ii

Contents iii

PART I INTRODUCTION 1

PART II DESIGN AND ORGANISATION 3

1. Components That Make Up the Course Book Package 3

2. The Organisation of Content 3

3. The Suitability of Content for Student’s Level and the Teacher 4

4.The Sequence of Content 5

5. The Adequacy of Recycling and Revision 6

6 The Suitability of the Material for Self-study 7

7. The Clarity of Layout 7

PART III LANGUAGE CONTENT 7

1. The Study of the Course Book in its Coverage of the Main Grammar

Items Appropriate to Each Level 8

2. The Adequacy of Material for Vocabulary Teaching 8

3. The Study of the Course Book in Terms of its Inclusion of Material

For Pronunciation Work 9

PART IV SKILLS 10

1. The Study of the Course Book in Terms of its Adequate Coverage

of All Four Skills 10

2. The Study of Reading Passages and Accociated Activities in Terms

of Their Suitability for the Students’ Level and Interest 10

3. The Study of Listeninf Material in its Authenticity and Recording

Quality 11

4. The Study of the Material for Spoken English in its Design As to

Support Learners for Real Life Situations 12

PART V TEACHER’S BOOK AND TEACER’S ROLE 24

1. Teacher’s Book 24

2. Teacher’s Role 28

PART VI SOME PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS 29

PART VII QUESTIONNAIRE 29

1. Evaluatıon of Questionnaire I 29

1.1 Specifying the aims and analysing the learning and teaching Situations 29

1.2 To specify the learning and teaching situations 30

2.Evaluation of Questionnaire II 31

3. Evaluation of Questionnaire III 32

CONCLUSION 33

BIBLIOGRAPHY 35

APPENDIX

PART I INTRODUCTION

Teaching is an activity that can not stand alone, this completely gets even more hard when language teaching is considered. As the language is an abstract system. So the teachers need some guides in their teaching process and the magnitude of course books appear at this point since they are the basic means of presenting the language in a more concrete atmosphere.

How can the most appropriate course book be chosen for language teaching? Here some factors such as the learner group’s characteristics, the aim of the teaching program and the teacher, the period of the course should be taken into consideration. The learners’ characteristics including their age, nationality, educational backgrounds, native languages and their expectations when deciding on the course book.

To begin with their age, if the students are young, the book must be embellished with colourful, attractive pictures. The topics and tasks must be varied, interesting and appropriate for their level of comprehension. The book must include joyful games, puzzles and funny book characters. The subjects must be comprehensible and the instructions clear. As the young learners’ concentration span is very short, the book must not be full of grammatical items.

What about the adults? If the learner group consists of adults, the points that the teacher seeks for will change. The adults look for real life like images and subjects such as the the life story of a famous person or articles from newspapers or magazines. Besides these, adult learners look for reason or concrete clarifications in the explanations of the grammar points.

The other factors determining the course book is the students’ nationality and their native language. Firstly, the course book must have a cultural appropriateness. It must notimmerse the students into the culture of target language completely. For example, the studetns do not have to know the exact date of the Independence Day or the Traditional Meals of an English family. The names of the characters in the book must be chosen from various nations so that students get used to different aspects of various nations.

The other factors while choosing the course book are dependent on the educational background of the learners and their expectations from the course book.For example, are the students accustemed to learning by following deductive or inductive approaches? Or If they come from certain occupation areas, their expectations may surely vary. That is if their aim is to learn the language to become a fully proficient speaker every course book may not be suitable for their demands; or if they want to take an exam on their medical studies, the course book should respond to their expectations.

To continue with the aims of the teaching programme, it can be said that the course book should be chosen carefully. If the aim is to teach the learners spoken language in a very short time, then the course book should be speaking based, including role plays, daily conversations and projects which require oral presentations. If the aim is to make students proficient in writing, then the course book must include essay writing, report writng, planning the composition, making summaries, etc.

All of these factors prove that effective language teaching is dependent on choosing the right course book. So with this study the course book evaluated from different aspects bearing the mentioned factors in mind. Firstly the design and the organisation of the course book is studied in accordance with the certain subtitles. Then the language content is being checked from the view of its appropriateness for the students. After that the skills that are covered in the book are examined. Next the book is analyzed from the aspects of topic and methodology; whether it adopts inductive or deductive teaching approaches or whether the topics are comprehensible to the learners in cultural and social contexts. Then the teacher’s book and the teacher’s role are examined. At the end the cost of the whole course book package is learned and the parts of the package are studied to see if they require any supplementary equipment.

PART II DESIGN AND ORGANISATION

1. Components That Make up the Course Book Package

Second Language Course Books are usually presented in a package. The one held in this paper is named Open Doors. It covers three Student‘s Books, three Workbooks, three Teacher’s Books and 6 tape cassettes.The package is Oxford University Press product. The three Student’s Books are written by Norman Whitney but he designed the Workbooks in cooperation with Mike Macfarlane in the first one, Ann Ward in the second one and Michal Duckworth in the last one.

2. The Organisation of Content

Open Doors Course Books are well organised in content. The books’ content order is made suitable for situational syllabus, but it also contains topic based syllabus’ components in it. Some grammatical elements can be found, yet they are not stated as the structural syllabus requires them to be. It cannot be said that it is functional as the book does not handle all the topics exactly in this way.

In the situational syllabus the language items are presented in situations and settings. Also most of the dialogues, conversations or communication activities are framed in terms of situations. Open Doors aranges its activities in a similar way. First a dialogue or a conversation is given to the students. Then they are asked to answer questions or make exercises which include components related with the given situation. Students adapt those to role plays and then act them out using the terminology presented in the previous case.

In addition to the situational syllabus, there are components of topic based syllabus as well. Certainly, in those, where a topic is given and this topic helps a speciffic grammar structure to be examined in that particular unit. For example, Unit 8, Open Doors 1 starts with a reading part which has conversation in it at the same time and it is named : ‘What are you doing?’. This part tells about the routine activities of some people, then puts them in present situations asking them what are they doing at the moment. The aimed grammar structure is the use of Present Simple Tense together with Present Continuous Tense. Later in the exercises those two tenses are practiced under the light of this topic.

Similar examples can be given for the rest of the books found in this package as they are designed following the same procedures.

3. The Suitability of Content for Students’ Level and the Teacher.

The design and organisation of the subjects in the Student’s Books of this package is of great help both for the teacher and the students. It is so because every new unit satrts with dialogues presented with colourful pictures. Those, help the students not only to imagine the given situation but also to catch their attention on the new topic. Once they are introduced to them it is almost imposible not to go on following the lesson. The reason for this is the gripping way the items are held in it. Next exercises are a bit more complicated but not confusing.

Every unit has a wholness in it. After the pictured dialogues Comprehension part follows on; students have to answer questions and their answers are easily found in the previous texts and pictures. One step further is the Communication part where the learner is faced with new item/items but absolutely related with the lately learnt ones. Here they are asked to listen and repeat, then to ask and answer. Before coming to the Grammar part the Pronunciation part is presented. This one introduces only two sounds but certainly with enough samples to make the students familiar to them. The grammar section is again planned very strictly also taking in consideration the students’ level and their capacity of understanding as they presented every new item step by step from the simple to the complex one.

The ‘Study Skills’, which comes after the Grammar part, aims to help the students to develop themselves a kind of strategy for learning the given things. The next part is the Vacabolary. This one is presented in such a way that the learners have the advantage to learn the words seeing them in the pictures. Those, supported with exercises, where the new vacabulary can be practised, make everything easier.

Under the ‘English Across the Curriculum‘ title the book makes the students to apply the things they have already learned, because in these parts of the units there are exercises which inlude almost every new item. In addition to that the ‘Skills Work’ part where reading, listening, speaking and writing takes place, comlites the learning procces. Each unit ends with a song. Those are not only one of the enjoyable parts of the books, but also another place to practice the already acquired things.

Every Course Book is planned in a way that it suits with the students’ level and for the theacher it is easier to follow the given directions and the subjects.

4. The Sequence of Content

The content of each book is ordered very carefully considering the basis of complexity, students’ learnability and its usefulness. It is easy to follow the given topics as they are presented step by step from simple to complex.

Grammar items and tenses are handed out in the same way. This of course helps learners to show high performance trough their learning process. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of of the provided knowledge in each unit there are special parts which show the students what they managed to learn and where to apply them.Actually, this is important for the learners to build up their selfconfidence in using the language.

5.The Adequacy of Recycling and Revision

It is obvious that while planning this package everything was thought in details.The most used and the most beeded topics are held very carefully; they are recycled and revised where it is seen to be necessary. Present Simple tense doubtlessly is one of the most used tenses, it can be said that it stands in the base of the other ones. In every level of the books this topic is taken to account. In Open Doors 1, where it is introdused for the first time, it takes place in the first five units. In the second book it is revised in Unit 5 and in the third one it is stated together with Present Continuous Tense in Unit 1.

Same things can be seen with Present Continuous Tense, in the first book it comes out in Units 7, 8 and 9 while in the second book it is revised together with Present Simple Tensein the last unit of that copy.Open Doors 3 gives this tense in comparison with Present Simple Tense,as it was mentioned before, in Unit 1. But it is seen in unit 10 again, this time together with Future Tense.

Those recycling processes and revisions are seen not only in the tense presentations, but in other grammatical items too. For example, the countable and uncountable nouns. In the first book the subject is worked out in unit 4, very simply it introduses the plural and singular forms of the words. Then to recycle, revise and develop it it is held in Unit 11,same book, to add ‘how many’ and ‘how much’ questions.The same topic appears in Unit 4, Open Doors, Student’s Book 2.Here the same process is followed, but adding new words and items like ‘some’ and ‘any’.

There is no need to give more examples to show that there is an adequacy in the use of recycling and revision. Clearly, most of the topics are revised and recycled in case to be compared with a new one or to make it easier for the learners understanding.

6. The Suitability of the Material for Self-study.

The self-study suitability of the material in this package, as the all other subjects taken to consideration till now is quite relevant. This thought is supported by the Grammar section which takes place at the end of each Student’s Book. Moreover, all grammar exercises are given with examples which helps the students to understand what they are wanted to do and of course how to do it.

What is more, each new subject can be practised in the exercises given in the Workbooks. Probably the only side which may make up a dilemma for the learners’ self-study will be the pronunciation and listening. For those the students need to have the cassettes.

7. The Clarity of Layout.

The Course Books’ design and organisation is quite applicable for

following each subject in them. Certainly the reason for this is the clear layout. There is a connection between the topics and the exercises.What is more, they are designed to complete each other and develop the learners’ skills on the given subject. There is no possibility for the students to get lost or feel confused through learning process adopt with the help of this book. Each unit has a very clear plan which is highlighten with the most important headings and subheadings.