Reinventing the wheel with text books

[tonelir]

I'm often dumbfounded as to why some language schools and companies that outsource English teachers, have their own inhouse text books. I'm very against this because:

1. It's reinventing the wheel
2. A language school cannot compete with the likes of Cambridge or Oxford Press or the other great text book publishers. Off the shelf text books contain beautiful illustrations and carefully thought and proofread lessons.
3. It's a big time waster for language schools. Shouldn't they be more concerned with training teachers and increasing student numbers?

I know the reason why these schools and outsourcing companies use inhouse text. It's a major sales point. "We have developed our own inhouse text to cater to students' needs." As far as I see, this their main motivator for going down this path.

Students and customers should start to wake up and tell these time wasting schools not to develop such inferior text to bore our students with.

Appreciate everyone's feedback. I've also posted a poll with this thread.

Thanks for reading.

[cdevine]

I would agree there is no need creating inhouse text. Like Tonelir said, stuff bought off the shelves are already excellent.

I also find teacher's prefer professionally developed text with colorful pics etc.

[Hypiereon]

In house text-books can be more focused and cheaper. Yes, it's reinventing the wheel, but at the same time some of the adult classes do not need pretty pictures. As well, some in-house text books can be specific to a certain profession, and not really all that available except in fragmented form in several other text books.

I can see the good and bad in both. Cheaper price generally means cheaper quality (in China almost synonymous with pirated) but also can be more focused. In a larger class with younger students, a more established system would be better. The short of it is, I don't think there is a blanket big enough or well-rounded enough to cover that bed.

[cdevine]

I do like some pictures though in my text when learning another language. It breaks up the boredom of black and white blocks of text.

For speciality courses such as Medical English, Legal English etc., then the only option is in-house text. But for general English programs, I think books such as Headway, Interchange, Side-by-Side etc. are excellent.

[kmossman]

The huge majority of inhouse material I have seen is rubbish compared to the better textbooks.

It's all ego and marketing.

These inhouse efforts are rushed, badly editted, and rarely tried in a class room before committing to print.

Run away if a school boasts of their inhouse material, or worse, offers you chance to work on such.

[teacherjoe]

I can see everybody's points about in-house textbooks, but I don't find the books by Oxford or Cambridge to be anywhere near "excellent". Pretty, yes. Organized, yes. Useful, rarely. I have found it much more effective to make my own lessons using TPR, storytelling, and writing and speaking activities that keep students active. They don't learn much from ANY textbook, unless it just happens to suit their needs perfectly, which is not likely with any mass-produced textbook.

[AdvantageEnglish]

I don't think that schools creating in-house texts is Reinventing The Wheel any more than any other textbook written today is a reinvention of the aforementioned wheel.

If a school uses trained, experienced teachers who create interesting topics and quality material - They can run educational programs that are one of a kind. Putting these ideas together into a text can allow the program to be implemented by all staff, creating a standard, reliable program throughout all classes in all schools within the company.

Of course, using off the shelf texts can also allow for uniformity and consistency.

It's a question of whether or not the school wants bragging rights for having a unique program used only by that school.

If the program is better than or at least equal in quality to anything else on the market at the time - it's time well spent.

Finally... 'Professional Books' usually have larger budgets which allow for nicer presentation, colour, glossy pages, accompanying activity books, cds, videos, teachers' guides, blackline master activities, accompanying web pages, posters, flashcards, ...so in my school, we've looked around and chosen the best off the shelf series for our needs and it works fine for us.

[AdvantageEnglish]

Originally Posted by cdevine

For speciality courses such as Medical English, Legal English etc., then the only option is in-house text.

You'll find a huge aray of specialty English texts on a variety of specific topics as well....

These are some of the lesser-known texts sitting on my shelf at the moment. All were free samples which I requested directly from the publishers and I have implemented most of them in classes.

Viewpoints in Law
Healthtalk - English for Hands on Nursing
Gateway to Medical English
English in Medicine
TV English - Macmillan
Environmental Issues
NewsFlash 2020 - Macmillan
Food - Deeper insights into What We Eat - Thomson


I think so many schools are using the same texts - Side By Side, Interchange, American Streamline (incidently, Nova corporation used to use this textbook with a reprinted cover identifying it as a Nova Text)... The problem is that schools are ignoring so many of the lesser used texts which have so much to offer. With only about 10 texts to choose from, schools often think that the only way to be different is to create a new text. But I agree with a previous poster - They're rushed, poorly researched, not tested, often written by unqualified teachers with no understanding of better teaching practice or learning styles,... I think people need to start to look beyond the shelves of Kinokuniya (in the case of Japan) and start browsing the publishers' online catalogs... There's so much good (untapped) material on offer !

[waixingren]

The reason most language training centers create their own text books is to get more money out of students. These are businesses that don't necessarily care about the improvement of their students--they just want students to be happy and continue to renew.

[MGH]

As an administrator for an education service provider here in Bangkok, we have toyed with the idea of creating our own in-house student books not for profit reasons nor even quality reasons. We are considering this because most of the available text books are so widely used by all the schools that many don't find the value in our using the same text book that they do. For example, Super Goal was a very good text book as a base for our conversational English program but we had to stop using it and redo our whole course because within 1 year, it was being printed/produced in Thailand and mass marketed to every public school in Thailand.

Therefore, I usually (as mentioned by Advantage English) look for books that are less well known and not published in Asia. The downside of this is that most of the good ones eventually make it to the Asia market to be locally produced.

Thanks!
Michael