Ixchell Reyes (0:00): What makes a language textbook actually useful, and what should you look for or avoid? We’re discussing what to think about when selecting a textbook in this episode of the DIESOL podcast.

Brent Warner (0:25): Welcome to the DIESOL podcast, where we focus on developing innovation in English as a second or other language. My name is Brent Warner, community college professor of ESL, and I’m here with the wonderful Ixchell Reyes, award-winning educator in innovation and professional development, specializing in teacher training with an ed tech focus. Ixchell, how are you? Happy end of the semester for you! Very exciting.

Ixchell Reyes (0:45): Hey!

Brent Warner (0:50): Yeah. How have you been? You’re holding up okay. You don’t really have semesters exactly, right?

Ixchell Reyes (0:56): Nope. We work through the summer, but that’s okay, because I work hard… English doesn’t stop – English learning, English teaching doesn’t have a pause for us. And that’s okay.

Brent Warner (1:03): *[laughter]* There you go. There you go. So today we’re going to be talking a little bit – depending on timing, like you said, you know, some things just rotate through. But at every point we all kind of end up maybe choosing textbooks, or maybe they’re given to us, right? So there’s lots of different situations. We move into a school and maybe they say, “Hey, here are the textbooks that you use.” You might be given a lot of flexibility to choose your own textbooks. A lot of people move to no textbooks – I’ve done that quite a lot of times in the past. Some do custom textbooks. If you’re into the Open Educational Resources thing and kind of building your own, there’s lots of different possibilities.

We’re not necessarily saying, “Hey, this is everything that needs to be in a textbook,” but we’re just saying, “Let’s take a look at some of the considerations when you look at a text” – whether that’s something that is a free resource for your students, or whether it’s a fully developed publisher’s textbook. Anything like that is just worth looking through and seeing what you’re trying to get out of your textbook. Ixchell, I know you’ve done a lot of these choices over the years. We’ll get into the details in a minute, but what do you go into thinking – stepping into your evaluation of textbooks?

Ixchell Reyes (2:34): Well, first of all, I always think of how much work I had to put into either a particular or current book to make it more accessible or comprehensible for the students. And then I try to see if other publishers or other versions are better than the one I’m using. You can always tell whether the person putting it together thought of the students, kept the students in mind. So I tend to look at layout a lot, actually. I’m a big fan of layout.

Brent Warner (3:06): I think that layout matters. And I think that part that you said too, which is, “How much adjustment do I have to do to this thing to make it functional for my students? What else do I have to do?” I always go in and say, “I like this. I don’t like this. I’m going to move this around,” whatever. But I know that there are a lot of teachers who are so busy, they just kind of get what’s given to them, and they run straight through. We don’t necessarily recommend that, but we also understand it can be hard sometimes. So we’re going to look at just a bunch of the main areas you might want to consider for choosing textbooks, whatever version of a textbook you’re looking at.

Ixchell Reyes (3:47): Yeah, and I think a lot of schools may be looking to adopt something new for the fall, so I think it’s actually a good time to talk about this.

Brent Warner (3:55): Cool! All right, let’s jump in. So we decided, Ixchell, we have a few categories here. The first one is, obviously, you gotta choose based on pedagogical foundations, right? What’s the pedagogy behind this? So what are the things that you’re thinking about when you look at that pedagogy?

Ixchell Reyes (4:15): Well, I definitely keep in mind whether a book has a balance of the four skills, like reading, writing, listening, speaking, and whether it naturally integrates grammar and vocabulary, rather than having the content isolated. That’s because I find myself constantly creating supplemental activities to some grammar textbook, and then I think, “No, we’re going to do the exercise in the book, but now we’ve gotta put it into play, and we’ve gotta role play the situation, or we’ve gotta now look at the real world and see how we’re using it.” Now let’s see if we can sort of guide the students to look for it in a reading in another class, perhaps. But I definitely think that anything that’s integrated can make it maybe easier for the teacher not to have to supplement something. Plus students sometimes read ahead on their own, even if that’s not what you’re covering in the class.

Brent Warner (5:08): Well, and integrated language learning – the pedagogy shows us that’s how students learn the best, right? If you’re just isolating skills by themselves, let’s recognize you can’t always control that. That might be a specific class that’s really focused on those things. So if you are doing a specific class, like, next semester, I’m doing a grammar class, which is very isolated. It’s totally decontextualized when you’re just looking at grammar. So how do you recontextualize it back into whatever bigger purposes you’re going for?

Those can be one big issue. What is the structure of it? How does it work together? And then that will tie in with the next one, which I feel like I don’t see as much or as clearly as I would like in most textbooks, which is how is it scaffolded in terms of building on top of itself, but also recycling previous concepts. I feel like so many textbooks, when you move into unit two – Unit One was about past tense, and then Unit Two is about future perfect – but then they never talk about the past anymore in the next one.

It seems to me like I would love to see more textbooks that somehow highlighted grammar features or language features that were already covered in previous chapters of the book. So you know that you’re building into it, because you could see, “Oh, that language is showing up again. We did study that, and that’s a reminder to students.” I almost never see – I don’t know that I’ve ever really seen that clearly put together. With the ability for us to build our own text, that is something that we can do, but I would love to see it also more in regular textbooks that we pick out there.

Ixchell Reyes (7:04): I want to say I agree with that, because oftentimes I’m the one – as a teacher, I’m the one reminding my students, “Hey, we’ve covered that. You already know that. You see you’re doing it.” But oftentimes students don’t feel like they’re learning or growing, and so if they’re by themselves keeping track of it by seeing a visual cue – let’s say color coded words like the orange means you saw it before, the green means it’s the current and the red means it’s something isolated that’s coming up in the next level – I think that’s actually really good for students, especially to boost their self esteem, so they know what they have to study.

And that leads me to how much authentic materials, how much incorporation of authentic materials and real world tasks are within that book. These kind of tasks should be preparing students for actual language use beyond just the classroom. And again, I have to make my own activities. But if there’s a little box on the side that says, “Real world experience, you could have your students do this, try this, try that,” that would make it so much easier than having to come up with one from scratch. I take a look at my textbooks, and if I’ve got a lot of notes on the side that tells me that activity needed a lot of supplemental material.

Brent Warner (8:26): Yeah. So you can also look at it – I mean, I think we all have to do our customizations. But I like that idea that when you go through and you take notes, you say, “Well, where are they going to see this out in the real world?” My brain always goes back to the language of taking orders at a restaurant. They’ll almost immediately be able to use that if they’re living here in California. But some of these ones are like, “Okay, this is language, but what situation…”

Ixchell Reyes (8:57): When are you going to use the subjunctive?

Brent Warner (8:59): Yeah, exactly. It’s not to say that those things are not worth studying. It’s just to say we want to think about the applications and where they fit in.

The last one here is just how is it aligning with current language learning theories and research-based approaches? You want to take a look at that and see – I think most major publishers will probably be pretty good about this, smaller ones maybe a little bit less. If you’re just ordering, for example, a lesson off of Teachers Pay Teachers, then you might not know if the pedagogy is scaffolded or built in a way that aligns with modern understanding. Some of these things can change over time.

Ixchell Reyes (9:41): Okay, so the next area that we focused on is cultural responsiveness and representation. We want to make sure that the textbooks we choose also represent the audience that’s looking at the material. One of the things that I constantly look for is what pictures, what scenarios, what context are in the book that reflects students’ diverse backgrounds and experiences. That can vary. You may have students who have traveled everywhere. You may have refugees, newcomers. Those scenarios are going to vary depending on your students. I would say that a good book will have a range of that.

Brent Warner (10:25): Yeah. I think we kind of make this joke about the traditional ESL textbooks are like, “Hey, have you ever been to London or New York City or Los Angeles?” The joke that I always make is, those are apparently the only three cities that exist in the world of our students.

Ixchell Reyes (10:44): That’s why my students think Los Angeles is a state!

Brent Warner (10:48): Yeah! So again, you’re kind of saying, “Well, hey, how do we make sure that there’s more going on?” Now, the AI conversation – we’ve talked about this quite a few times in the past – is very much easier now to contextualize it to students’ world views of the world. But you can also take a look through the text that you’re going at. Are there places that maybe these conversations could be updated and could be more interesting for them? If the answer is no, then great. If you’re saying, “Hey, this really works. It’s generalized well enough, and we can focus it in.” But sometimes you end up with these books that are still talking about, “Have you ever jumped on the internet before?” And it’s like, “Well, okay, we’re talking to it…”

Ixchell Reyes (11:32): “Have you ever built a bird house?”

Brent Warner (11:36): Yes, exactly!

All right. So next is, we want to look a little bit at structural elements. What are you trying to see in the overall build? I think the first one – we kind of go back to this from grad school, Ixchell, like, remember learning about the scope and sequence? They were always like, “Okay, it’s great.” A lot of us, if you’re in curriculum building, then you continue to be familiar with this. But I think a lot of teachers end up kind of like, “Oh yeah, I studied that in school and oh yeah, scope and sequence.” You got to make sure that you know what’s going on with things. What’s the order of them, what’s the overall intention of capturing everything?

Are you considering that, and is it going to fit in with how your intention for the semester is? A lot of these textbooks kind of push teachers into teaching in a way, in a timing that maybe they wouldn’t choose if they were just able to choose completely by themselves. But it feels like, “Okay, we have to move through the textbook in these ways.” How do those align with your build of the class? That can be easy to forget. I think over time, it’s like, “Wait a second, the textbook doesn’t control me.” It’s something that we’re using to practice the work and to understand what we’re talking about in class.

Ixchell Reyes (13:01): I actually do think that it is incredibly important for teachers at any level to go back to the scope and sequence. I think that was one of the most valuable lessons or skills that I learned when I was doing my K through 12 credential program. My supervising teacher when I was doing student teaching, that’s the first place she took me in the book. When I had to do student teaching, she said, “This is where you’re going to start. This is the mother place, and you’re going to take things from here, but you got to make sure you address these objectives. And if you don’t have time, you move on to the next level of the scope and sequence.” That actually really clarified it for me, and I often remembered her words: “This is a pacing guide, a pacing guide, a pacing guide. It’s to help you stay on track.”

But along with that, a book that is visually appealing and accessible has an accessible layout with clear instructions and intuitive navigation is really important, because if it’s messy for the teacher to navigate from appendix to the extra materials for printing or the index where things are, then it’s just going to get messy, and people aren’t going to go in there. Same for the students. A lot of the K through 12 pacing guides, or the curriculum books were very carefully laid out, and that made it very easy for someone who has to jump into an entire year’s worth of content. So I tend to look at my language textbooks that way now. Are they labeled? Are they color coded? Do they have icons to clearly look for where a link might be? Is it labeled and is it cluttered? I don’t like to look at cluttered things. Does it invite the student to write in the book and take notes? Are there diagrams? Is there space for creativity? Because students like to doodle, and I like that kind of stuff. It has to be visually appealing.

Brent Warner (15:09): I think, just thinking of – I still think that National Geographic, as far as the major publishers, they’re so good looking. When you go through those books, if you’re talking about traditional publishing books, it’s like, “Okay, those pictures make it appealing.” They do a wonderful job in the Nat Geo learning of the visual layouts, all those things, but it’s multiple parts. It’s not just, “Hey, pretty pictures,” but it’s like, “How does it work in the flow? How does it engage the students?” All those things. So I like that a lot.

Okay, so last one here, and we’ll just kind of zip through the last one before we go on break anyways, is practical classroom considerations. Are the activities in the book things that you can do inside of your class? Cost is an issue. Cost continues to be an issue. So are they low price textbooks? Are they just accessible online for free? Are they whatever else it is? You just kind of have to think about all these parts of things to say, “What’s going to work for me, what’s not going to work and what do I have access to?” For example, if we all have computers in our classroom, and it’s a very digital heavy one, okay, that’s one thing. But if it’s saying, “Hey, go on the web and search for this,” and you’re saying, “Well, we don’t have computers for our students,” then you have to consider that as well.

All right, Ixchell, you know that I have a book coming out very soon. We’ll be talking more about that in the next episode, I believe. But if you want to know information about the book coming out, the TESOL project coming out, there’s a couple different things that are all coming out in June, this month as the episode rolls. If you’re interested, please do sign up for the newsletter. We’ll give you some more information about it all as these things come. And I think, Ixchell, you’ve seen that we’ve been very good about our promise about not sending too many at all. So anyways, take a look. Please go sign up at DIESOL.org if you want to get onto the newsletter and make sure that you know about the upcoming events and things coming out.

Ixchell Reyes (17:28): So the next segment is student engagement and motivation. One of the areas that I look into is whether activities in the book encourage interaction and collaboration, and not just for your average student, but also different learning styles and different learning preferences. So again, to reflect a classroom that may have 30 students of various backgrounds and experiences.

Brent Warner (17:59): So next one is tech integration, digital literacy. I mean, we’re living in a world where we need to teach students about these things all the time. A lot of my students don’t really have a good understanding of how to use tech and how to be appropriate. The AI conversations, of course, but really everything. What’s the appropriate way to interact online, as it’s so much of our time in life? Are these things built in? Are they parts of the conversation? I would say, going back to kind of the previous ones, is like, “Well, relevant to the students?” These conversations are super relevant. But a lot of teachers skip over them because they’re like, “Oh, we don’t want to talk about tech all the time.”

Ixchell Reyes (18:41): Or they think that they’re digital natives, and they should know, whereas we don’t approach plagiarism that way. We talk about it in every single writing class, and it’s built into a book. So these kind of ethical considerations should also – or the etiquette should be built into every book, because that’s what we’re training our students to think about all the time, especially when using technology.

Brent Warner (19:06): Yeah. Next section, depending on where you’re teaching – what are the language varieties that you’re trying to expose your students to? I think it’s very easy to have America-centric textbooks. It’s like, “Hey, this is kind of the general version, and then you switch it maybe later on.” But the truth is, I’ve seen some posts – it’s like, “Oh, we’re Scottish EFL professors, and we have very different ways of saying a lot of things.” So how do you get materials that is customized to the type of English that the students are going to be studying with you? Maybe that broad, generalized one is not the one, and we need to get super focused and help students understand the language of where they live. Are those available? Are there ways to adjust to include specific language varieties?

Ixchell Reyes (20:01): Yeah, and I also think inclusion of informal registers and contemporary expressions should be listed alongside formal language. This is something that recently, with teaching cohort from different nations, they talked about, “Well, in my country, we say this in English, but then I came here, and you guys don’t really say it. And all this time, we thought we were speaking, we were saying the right thing.” It’s like, “Well, okay, that’s your localized English, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But why shouldn’t a textbook make a little note, ‘Hey, in some countries this may be used this way, but however, if they’re traveling to America, this is what they might see instead.'”

Brent Warner (20:45): Yeah, you know, it’s hard to cover every single variation, of course, in any text, but at the same time, just pointing out that these things exist can be helpful.

Ixchell Reyes (20:57): Yeah, and some books do have it. I’ve seen books where they’ll say speakers of Vietnamese background may have this error, or may make this error. Speakers of Levantine Arabic make this error. Those kind of things, even if there’s only two or three you mentioned, it’s better than zero.

Brent Warner (21:15): Yeah, for sure. Okay, so Ixchell, we’re going to run out of time here, but I just want to zip through a couple. And if you have any comments on them, please do. But a couple things with thinking is like, going back to the tech thing – how are 21st Century Skills brought in? But also, critical thinking. Are we just talking about language, or are we challenging our students to really be more involved with the critical thinking of the world? That’s a huge thing in my class. I spend a lot of time trying to push, “Let’s be more thoughtful, creative and critical thinkers in our classes.”

Also, how accessible is the text? We mentioned that partly in the design, but it can also just be actual accessibility needs for students that maybe have reading problems, or whatever else it is. We can also look at things like teacher development. Is there support for the teachers inside of the text? How do the assessments run? All of these kinds of things.

We spend some time, but it’s worth having, I think, Ixchell, having a kind of a goal of, “Here are the things that I really want to make sure that I’m looking for,” and not just letting the book present itself to you or the text present itself to you, but for you to go in and analyze and say, “This is what I need. This is what I’m looking for,” and build your own checklist for it.

Ixchell Reyes (22:36): Also, I think it’s important to give feedback to the publishers. In many contexts, I’ve been asked, “Okay, so if you’re looking for this, what might make this version, our next version, better?” And I do tell them, “Well, I feel this way about it.” And sometimes they take that into consideration. If you just accept the book as it is and don’t give them the feedback, they’re not going to – I mean, what other teacher feedback are they getting, and who are they getting it from? So we want a book that at least includes teachers’ voices and they’re considering the teachers’ and students’ needs when they’re developing a new version.

Brent Warner (23:16): Yeah, well, and that too – your sales rep has a direct door to the update versions. A lot of times it feels like, “Oh, this company is so big they don’t really care.” But it’s like, no, especially the ESL ones, they’re fairly smaller than you might think. Your rep can go and talk directly to the publishers and to the editors and say, “Hey, our teachers are talking about this.” It also is like a case, depending on how big your school is, you say, “Well, we might order books next time around, we might not. It needs to match our needs.” So you do have power with that as well, and just keep that in mind.

Ixchell Reyes (23:58): All right, it is time for our fun find! This time, I found that I’m obsessed with Italian brain rot lore. Have you heard of it?

Brent Warner (24:11): I know one of those words, which is brain rot. What’s Italian?

Ixchell Reyes (24:19): I thought you were gonna give me an example of Italian brain rot!

Brent Warner (24:23): Well, you tell me, I’m just learning about this now.

Ixchell Reyes (24:27): So this is a recent meme, like a recent trend, likely on probably TikTok and Instagram. They’re just these absurd, ironic photos and little short videos with AI generated cartoons, and they have these Italian names like Charla tra la la and ballerina cappuccino, and they’re just hilarious. And again, as the word suggests brain rot, you feel like, “What the heck?” And they’re just uncanny. They’re hilarious. And so they bring me joy, and we need as much joy as we can get.

Brent Warner (25:05): Anywhere you can find it.

Ixchell Reyes (25:07): Just like an Italian brain rot lore, you will find it!

Brent Warner (25:12): Okay, all right, so mine’s a little bit of music. The other night, I went to a concert, and I saw The Damned and The Adverts, both of which are – well, The Damned has a long, long history. Adverts were one of the original British punk bands. Anyways, I had a great time at the show. The Damned – I’ve been listening to The Damned since high school, but I’ve never seen them. So there’s the first time I saw them. Great live show, really fun. The Adverts, I didn’t know really very much at all. They put on an amazing show too. Really blew me away. So if you’re just into hearing some of that older punk…

Ixchell Reyes (25:49): Older punk, yeah, you’re such a cool person.

Brent Warner