In the TEFL arena, adapting published materials is indispensable. Quality and innovative teachers always tend not to follow course- books to the letter. They prefer to adopt a choose-and-pick approach whilst looking for materials that may cater the needs of their learners.A case in point is:
Company to Company
[Andrew Littlejohn, 2005] has been chosen to cater for the needs and wants of a group of admin-staff whose job responsibilities involve handling phone calls[1] and replying to and writing business correspondence.
The needs analysis revealed that the group unanimously need to improve their writing skills of e-mails, letters, faxes and memos with topics that are quite common in almost all business correspondence (making enquiries, placing an order, requesting for information/a quotation, making mild and strong complaint, apologising, giving bad/good news, confirming arrangements, writing /declining an invitation and replying to complaints...).
Against this background, Company to Company has been designated to serve the needs of this particular group. The overall design of the book is attractive and looks very professional. In the same respect, the book appears to be professionally interesting and task-based.
The units of this course-book are specialised and perfectly match the kind of needs expressed by the group in terms of both topics and tasks. The latter sound realistic and of much relevance .They present real-life situations almost like the ones the students routinely handle in their jobs.
In conclusion,it needs to be emphasized that any course-book needs to be supplemented with extra materials.No course-book can comprehensively meet one's needs.As such,the select-reject-adapt and supplement approach has been incorporated very often in parallel with the above mentioned course-book.Sometimes some tasks are omitted and others and others are adapted or re-worded differently to ease understanding.
The overall layout of the book allows ample opportunities for extra manoeuvre and adaptation.Some tasks are reformulated to provide further focus and work on the lexical chunks.In fact,Email English (Paul Emmerson 2004 ) has a battery of exercises that provide perfect practice opportunities.
[1] Focus here is on Company to Company. ‘English for Business Communication’ (Simon Sweeney 2003) has been chosen to cater for telephoning skills.
No comments:
Post a Comment