PART
III LANGUAGE
CONTENT
1.
The Study of the Course Book in its Coverage of the Main Grammar Items
Appropriate to Each Level.
In the school this book is taught, was seen plainly that all grammar items are relevant for their level. The students were cooping with them quite well.Same thing was accepted and approved by theit teachers,too.
The first book starts with basic components and later every subject is given with sufficient stages of difficulty, that no complexity occurs to confuse the learners.What is more, the newly presented items are given in such amounts which will not cause troubles for the students.They just get used to those by practicing them and after understanding and getting familiar enough they are introduced to the more complex forms. Present Simple Tense can be shown as an example for this. It is introduced in Unit 1, Open Doors 1, with its simplest form (affirmative form of ‘be’ ). While in Unit 4, same book, which is the last one that helds Present Simple Tense before the revision lesson (negatives and interrogatives of the regular verbs of that tense are shown).
The language form and the language use in the book has a notifying emphasis, the balance between those two is obtained, too.There can be seen newly presented items related to and contrasted with items already familiar to the students. An example for this, can be Unit 4 in Open Doors 3 where Present Perfect Continuous Tense is introdused. Then in Unit 5 it is contrasted and compared with Present Perfect Simple Tense which was given in Unit 3.
2.
The Adequacy of Material for Vocabulary Teaching.
Open Doors Course Books have exact parts in each unit named Vocabulary. These parts are mostly related with the topics held in the Presentation parts. The new vocabulary is presented both visual (pictures and the written form of the words) and by listeng. Students can rehearse the new vocabulary in the workbooks as well, as they usually include exercises supporting, developing and practising the lately aquired items. The quantity of the new vocabulary components is not exaggerated for the level of the students; they seem to be enough.
The presentation of the vocabulary follows a structured and purposeful way. For example, Unit 8, Student’s Book 2 ‘The orchestra: musical instruments’ are presented. They are shown in pictures, at the same time in the listening part the students can hear some sounds of the instruments and write their names.
The next part,’English Across the Curriculum’ is again related with the same topic under the ‘Technology:second recording’ heading. Here once more the learners have to coope with the vocabulary on musical instruments.
In conclusion, the book handles the vocabulary items taking in consideration the students’ level, their capacity of learning them, moreover, gives them the opportunity to develop their own learning strategies and practise their new vocabulary under the frames of role plays, pair and group works.
3. The Study of the Course Book in Terms of its Inclusion of Material for Pronunciation Work.
In the Cousre Book there can be found special exercises for pronunciation.Some of them pay attention to the individual sounds, while some other work on word-stress. Unfortunately, the individual sound exercises are mostly seen in the first Student’s Book which is for the students with beginning level. Later in the second and third books those exercises include word-stress. Then they pass to sentence stress and finally to the intonation of some sentences, questions, etc.
The Pronunciation part is mostly presented with listening and repeating, sometimes with writing. The cassettes used for this purpose are very helpful and useful as the difference between the sounds aimed to be taught.
PART
IV SKILLS
1. The Study of the Course Book in Terms of its Adequate Coverage of All Four Skills.
As we all know, the four skills listening, reading, speaking and writing are indispensable part of any language. If a person lacks even these skills, we can not then call him/her a fully proficient speaker. Therefore one of the skills are valued in the course books and every course book has the title of ‘improving skills ‘ among its key features or aims.
Open
Doors is a book that also has the goal of improving skills. In Open Doors
1, four units
among the total twelve units contain parts that cover all the four skils
under the title of Skills Work. In Open
Doors 2, there are only two units that cover all the four skills in Skills
Work. The rest of the units in both books cover two or three of the skills. The
Skills Work is limited especially
for writing in the third book. The
students are expected to concentrate on effective writing such as summarizing,
writing formal letters and
narrating a story. The limitations on some skills and the emphasis on others are directly related to
some grammar points. That
is; as the grammar points become more intensive, the degree of complexity
increases accordingly.
Generally speaking, then, Open Doors provides an integration of four skills bearing in mind the baility and the level of the students. For example in Open Doors 1, there is a Skills Work part on page 10. As it comes right after the first unit of the book, there are simple but useful activities including all the skills.
2.
The Study of Reading Passages and Associated Activities in Terms of
Their Suitability for the Students’ Level and Interests.
The reading passages in all three levels of Open Doors generally give information about students’ interest. Some of these are films, music, daily routines, family, etc. There are some units which contain reading parts that either present or review some grammar points. In Open Doors 3, the second activity on page 66 is a good example for this. Here, the students are expected to read the composition and circle the logical connections. Also, there are even some units where the students are provided with modals for their own writings. For example, activities 1 and 2 on page 42 give some clues about how to write a formal letter.
Besides being really interesting to students the reading passages in the course books are designed to be as authentic as possible to draw the student’s attention immediately to the text. Moreover there is variety of different types such as newspaper/ magazine extracts, letters and recipes. To support students’ understanding of what they have read or will read, the books supply some pre and post-reading activities. While the pre-reading questions are some kind of warm up with the aim of focusing students’ attention to a specific topic, the post reading questions test the learners’ understanding of the passage.
To summarize then, the reading passages in all the levels of Open Doors are of a good quality, interest and authenticity which are suitable for students’ levels varied in types and help comprehension.
3.The Study of Listening Material in its Authenticity and Recording Quality.
The activities of listening are dealt within two different ways in the bopoks. Firstly, there are specific listening passages which are based on the activities such as comprehension questions. In other words in these kind of activities, the students are expected to listen and answer the given questions. At this point, it must be mentioned that there are pre-listening tasks and questions that are a warm-up for them.
Open Doors handles the listening activities from the point of view of pronunciation. In such exercises, the students are expected to listen and repeat so as to differentiate the sounds and articulations. They are expected to do the exercises afterwards.
The quality of the recorded sound is also fine. The students can get away with the pace, it is not very quick. Also, the level of the recorded material is not above the students’ level and there is not any daviation at all from the standard English that the learners are familiar with.
4.The
Study of the Material for Spoken English in its Design as to Support Learners
for Real Life Situations.
In Open Doors 1, eleven units out of twelve include activities for speaking in Skills Work Part. In Open Doors 2 ,half of the units in skills part include speaking. Open Doors 3, however, has its main focus on writing but there are some parts that require the students to practice orally. So, this data, then, shows that Open Doors tries to include as many speaking activities as possible especially for first level students. That is to say, speaking starts in accordance with other skills and from the very beginning.
The speaking activities include oral presentation and practice, dialogues, role plays and communication. For example Open Doors 1,page 10 includes a speaking activity that requires the students to interview each other by asking some questions. There the students communicate so as to get over the information gap.
There are also some other activities designed for the students to prepare a speech for oral presentation. In Open Doors 1 ,activity 4 on page 42 wants wants the students to tell about their dream home. Such activities let students get used to talking.
Open Doors pays a great attention to the mechanical aspects of speaking such as pronunciation. How students speak is as important as what they say. Pronunciation activities are held with listening skill by the books. For example, in Open Doors 2 the pronunciation exercise on page 29
requires the students to listen and repeat, and then differentiate the words.
Some of the activities held under the heading of speaking form the discussion of pre-reading questions. This can be seen in Open Doors 2 page 26. Before reading a text, the students are encouraged to talk about the maýn topic of the text as a warm-up activity. So a number of ideas are developed in students’ minds as a result of the discussion.
In addition to this there are also useful strategies for being a fluent speaker. This shows that knowledge of communication (theory) is taken seriously as well as communicating (practice ).
5.
The Study of Writing Activities in Their Amount
of Control, Degree of
Occuracy and Organization of Longer
Pieces of Writing.
Open Doors handles writing in four ways. One of these is named as ‘controlled writing’. Such exercises are for the students to fill in the blanks with the given words. This is actually the easiest kind of activity.
Secondly, writing activities include raising on awareness of the parts of a composition. For instance, exercise 1 on page 26 of Open Doors 3 wants the students to rearrange the given pharagraphs in correct order. So that they will have an orderly composition in hand and form an idea about the way a written text is organized.
Moreover, there are ‘guided writing’ activities in the books. Exercise 3 on page 18 of Open Doors 3 is a good example for this. Here the students are given sample questions according to which they will write paragraphs about their friends.
There is finally a kind of writing activity which is named ‘semi-free writing’ as in page 34 of Open doors 3. Activity 3 expects the students to create an end for the story they read. Here, the learners are still under the control of the book but to some extent this time.
In addition to these, Open Doors 3 includes parts under the heading of ‘Professor Goodwrite’s advice ‘. Here, there are boxes and in them there are small but useful reminders to the students. These are generally strategies about writing accurately, organising clearly and using correct grammatical contractions .
PART
V TOPIC
AND METHODOLOGY
1.Topic
1.1
The efficiency
of topics in terms of their assistance in developing
the students’ awareness and reaching their experience .
Language course books are primarily a means for facilitating language learning. In achieving this, they can not simply do that; because languge is not an abstract system; it is used in real situations for real purposes. So, course books must represent language as it is actually used in real life and this can be achieved by using various kinds of topics. Learners come to class with knowledge, skills, attitudes, curiosity and experience. Language learning engage these attributes so that the learning process is made more meaningful. Course books can contribute to this process by including informative, challenging, exciting topics. This kind of topics provide opportunities for expanding the students’ experience in general as well as in language learning.
Learners may get the information better when they are not only concentrating on learning the target languge, but also using the langugage to do things in real life. This shows the importance of choosing the suitable topics for the learner group. The selection of topics is related with the qualifications of the learner group such as their age, linguistic level, nationality, their purpose for learning the taget languge, etc.
Open Doors Course Books are prepared to be used with young learners; therefore the topics appeal to them. The topics are the ones thatyoung learners can understand easily and use in real life and they are communication based. ‘Introducing people’, ‘Talking about possessions’,’Plans and intentions’,’Making polite request’,’Talking about the future’ are some of the topics in student’s book.
The topics are functional so that the learners use the language to do things in real life. The topics in each level of Open Doors Student’s Book inform, challenge, stimulate, enrich experinces, encourage curiosity and do the other things that the real language does. In these books the topics are developed in a communicative way; by getting the students to ask and answer questions to each other, make dialogs, role plays, shortly letting them speak. This means that interaction occurs between the learners.
The communication that occurs while dealing with the topics in student’s book of Open Doors is very meaningful among the learners since the subjects are suitable for their interests. For example the subjects are not much related with politics but school teams or pop stars. Therefore the learners get motivated easily on the topic they are learning and their experience is enriched in real life.
As a conclusion Open Doors Student’s Books are communicative since they communicate effectively themselves about worthwhile subjects and promotes meaningful communication among their users.
1.2 The comprehensibility of the social and cultural context in the Course Book for the learners.
In the course books the materials are given in social and cultural context. Those should be comprehensible to the learners in terms of social moves, age groups, the relationships between the characters,their behaviours so that they can relate the language used to its purpose in the social context. If the coursebooks have any subject content, they will directly or indirectly communicate sets of social and cultural values. A curriculum of a course book can not be nutral. It has to express a value system implicity or explicity. As the underlying value system is not expilicit, it is necessary to look at course books in detail to see the unstated values and then to decide their comprehensibilty to the learners in terms of the representation of men and women in language teaching materials, the ethnic origins of the characters in the course book, their occupation, social relationships, etc.
In Open Doors’ Student’s Books there are twelve different topics in each level. The language items are given in context by using stories, newspaper articles, letters, etc. In Student’s Book 1 and 2 the new item is introduced to the students at the beginning of the unit by a developing story. These stories consist of dialogs occuring between, the women and the girls,in number are represented equal with men and boys. There is no dominance of any gender to each other. In Student’s Book 3 the short stories and the articles of magazines are used to introduce the new language items.In these stories and articles, men and women are equal in number, either. When the books are searched in terms of gender role, it is seen that again there is equivalance. The girls can do whatever the boys do. In Book 3 there are topics about famous people. Both famous men and women are chosen and introduced. Since Open Doors is used with young learners, the characters in course books are school boys and girls. Girls are succesful as well as the boys; their is emphasized, too.
The characters that we see in course books are all English. Only English names are used for the characters. Only in Student’s Book 1, Unit 2,the topic is ‘Nationalities’ so that foreign names are used from different countries.
Since the characters in course books are young, they are all school boys and girls. We see these characters sometimes at school, at disco, at the cinema, etc; so that the other people are their mums, dads, bus drivers or waiters. If in one of the reading texts, the bus driver is a male, then the ticket-seller is female. There is a balance. In the topics dealing with famous people the chosen people are singers or film stars who are very popular among the young learners.
All the characters have real identitiy and they appear again throughout the book. They belong to families and they are shoolmates with the other characters. Their relationships with the other characters, their friends, families are dealt within the course books. We do not see the characters in isoplation, but in a social relationship with people. So they guide the learners in their social life and supply an example of good relationships and enrich their experince in life.
In conclusion, the Open Doors Course Books are comprehensible to the young learners in social and cultural context as they bring the real life situations into the class and make the lesson more lively.
3.
Methodology
2.1
Language learning approaches that the course book incorporates .
Two common learning approaches used in course books are inductive and ‘deductive’ learning.In ýnductive learning approach, before the rule is stated examples of language which illustrate a rule such as a short story , a letter ,an article from a magazine, etc. are given. First the learners see the new items in a context and they are able to hypothesize about what the rule might be by studying these language examples. By the help of teacher or further examples given learners have the chance of checking their hypothesis.
In deductive learning, first the rules are given expilictly and the
learners are expected to understand these rules and then produce correct sentences based on the rules with the guidance of the examples given in the book. As rules are given at the beginning explicitly there is no context for the learners to become familiar with the rules.
Many course books use ‘inductive learning‘ approach; first they introduce the new items in a context and then isolate the rules and consolidate learners’ understanding by givin the rules clearly.
Open Doors Course Books also use the balance of inductive and deductive learning approaches.In these cpourse books, each unit starts with a story. I n Student’s Book 1 and 2 there is a developing storyline. In Student’s Book 3 the articles and stories are independent from each other these stories supply a context for introducing the new language items before giving the rules clearly. After students become familiar with the new items in context rules are stated explicitly and most of the time, given in tables.
2.2 The techniques used for presenting and practicing new language items.
In Open Doors Student’s Books, each unit is organised in the same format. Each unit starts with a conversation, an article or a short story. The learners read and listen the texts. Then Comprehension part comes for consolidating the learners’ understanding of the story. In Comprehension section,the exercises are mostlyin fill-in-the blanks,answering the questions or true/false type. In theseexerceses, one example is given and then students are required to find the answers according to the example. By answering these questions students get familiar with the new language items unconciasly.Their understanding and writing abilities are important.
Then the section called Communication comes. In this section the communicative aspect of language is emphasized. Activities in this part mostly measure listening and speaking skills. In communication activities there is a model dialogue for the learners to listen and repeat.In those dialogues the examples of new language items of the unit is ‘Present Perfect Tense’, the dialogue is constructed with the tense for supplying the examples of the usage of the new language item in communicative way. After the learners listen and repeat the dialogue, they start producing. They ask and answer questions about the pictures given below the dialogue with their partners according to the example dialogue. In this way they personalize the dialogue so it becomes more realistic . Interaction also occurs while they are asking and answering with their partners.
The following section is Pronunciation in which sound discrimination is dealt with. This section starts with an example for the learners to listen and repeat. The phonetic alphabet is used for showing the sounds discrimination. In the table that is given as an example; the phonetic symbol of two similar sounds are stated and below each symbol the words which have these sounds are written. The learners listen and repeat these words and realize the differences of the sounds. Then a group of words are given and the learners are required to discriminate the sounds of the words and write them into the correct column.
Besides sound discrimination activities, some of the pronunciation sections are about the word and sentence stress. The same technique is used while teaching word and sentence stress. First, some words or sentences are given with the sign showing the place of the stress and then the students find the place of the stress of the other word and sentences in the exercise after practising by listening and repeating.
After the learners practice the new language items in a context unconciously, now they are introduced with the rules in Grammar section. Here, the rules are in tables clearly. The learners study the rules , compare and discuss them with the class. In some of the exercises that take place in Grammar section the learners are required to complete the missing rules with the guidance of examples. Then exercieses come. Most of the follow- up exercises are in fill-in-the blanks type. The learners are immediately expected to use the correct form of the new language item and practice it in more structural way. Writing skill is more dominant to other skills in this section.
After practicing the new item grammatically, the section called the Study Skills comes. In this section general subjects are dealt with ‘Understanding Dictionary Entries ‘, ‘ Memorizing Vocabulary ‘, ‘Learning From Mistakes ‘, ‘Choosing the Best Time and Place to Study’, etc. As it is understood from the titles/topics, this part intends to make the learners more conscious about studying on their own. In this part it is aimed to guide the learners in their studies both at home and at school. The chosen subjects are related with real life and selected carefully according to the learners’ needs. They are mostly about the problems that the students face at school and in their own studies. This is firstly achieved by giving examples and then getting the learners to produce ; sometimes by writing, sometimes by speaking.
The
following section is Vocabulary. The aim of this section is enlarging the
learners’ vocabulary knowledge.This part is enriched with
a picture showing the words that will be learned. In some of those
vocabulary activities the objects
in the pictures are directly named
and students are required to listen and repeat the names. In some of them the
words are given seperately and the learners are required to match the names
of the objects with the correct
pictures. The follow-up activities in vocabularyare in various types, but most
of them are based on speaking. They have
the learners ask and answer questions with
their partners. In this way the learners practice the use of the new
words in real life situations.
In Open Doors Student’s Books, some topics are included which cross traditional subject boundaries. The books have texts on aspects of geography, history, mathematics, science, etc. In each unit these texts are included in a section called English Across the Curriculum. Geography: the British Isles, History: legends from different countries, Mathematics: numbers, fractions and percentages can be given as the examples for the topics in this section. The learners have the chance of practicing and using English in other subjects. This section enriches the learners’ experience by making them familiar with the other subjects . In these activities the students use all of their skills; listening, speaking, reading and writing as follow-up activities are in various types.
Until this part, all skills are covered in a mixed way by various types of activities through the book. In other words the learners practiced the new items by listening, reading, speaking and writing. The other section taking place in each unit is Skills Work in which four skills are practiced seperately. In this part, there are different exercises for different skills. For example, in one exercise; the learners read the letter and in the second one correct the sentences given according to the letter. Then they listen from the tape and choose the correct statement among three choices in exercise three. At the end the students are required to write a similar letter. This example shows that each skill is practced seperately from each other.
At the end of each unit all the items that learned during the unit are revised in the section called Progress Diary. There are five different exercises in it; Grammer, Vocabulary, Communication, Pronunciation. Each unit finishes with a song. These activities are mostly structural but in communication activities the students are required to speak.
In summary, each unit has the same format in presenting and practicing new language items in Open Doors Students Books.