Italian French English

1. Adult students have adult mind and interests: The adult coursebook is catering for people who do not think, speak, learn or behave in the same way as children.

 The adultness of the students has consequences for the coursebook which has to maintain the interest of people who often have particular reasons for studying a new language, adult interests, social relationships and level of intelligence.

 To visualize the types of students the coursebooks are intended for one needs to look at the characters they feature and the topics they are about.

 The topics that students have to talk about during the course should be interesting and also should enable them to use the second language for their goals.

 Introducing people  Making plans and arrangements  Tourisim  Identifying and describing people  Parties  Discussion  Food

 Adultness has consequences for coursebooks. Talking about Adult Topics.  The topics have to be explorable to an adult level of conversation.  Soap operas, gardening and house design, sports.

 Willis describes 6 main types of tasks: o Listing o Ordering and sorting o Comparing o Problem solving o Sharing personal experience o Creative Atlas: Matching Clasifying Conversational patterns Cooperating Changes: Giving directions Panorama: Body parts Libre Echange: Comparing individuals

 Learning a second language infantilizes people.  To justify infantilization we can use the scaffolding from Vigotsky.

2. Second language users are people in their own right: L2 users are not just monolingual native speakers with an additional language but people with new strenghts and abilities.

Adoption of the Native Speaker Goal  Succes is measure by how close the students get to a native speaker norm.  Native speakers speak differently when a non-native speaker is around.

 User Roles A good motivation factor for the L2 learners are famous people who has learn another language for their own purposes.

We need to see every day situation in which L2 users are successfully dealing with each other or with native speakers.

 Klein and Perdue (1997) have indeed established a basic variety of grammar that learners of of several L2s go through which shows what the grammatical target language of an L2 user – based beginners course might look like  Corpora and descriptions of native speech are secondary information for L2 user based approach.

 English and Italian students based : -the language school  digs and tourist  traveling and shooping  find their way around the town  go to parties, meet people  In the French courses: street life, entretainment and sport drink in cafes, go to the cinemas and discos date each other

3. Language teaching has been held back by unquestioning acceptance of traditional nineteenth-century principles: The principles of the priority of speech and the avoidance of the first language.

 Language teaching taboos, such as the mother tongue, grammar, the printed an written word, which have affected our teachers with over – sized guilt complexes, are nothing but superstitions handed down from one innocent victim to the next´(Dodson, 1967:65)

 The writers have adopted the nineteenth – century injunction to avoid the first language  The point about L2 users is that the two languages are always present in the same mind, one language cannot be totally switched off when the other is being used, wether in term of vocabulary (Beauvillain and Grainger 1987) syntax (Cook1994) phonology (Obler 1982) or pragmatics (Locastro 1987).

Changes & Atlas emphasize  Listening  Speaking  Reading  Writting  In Atlas written language is mostly used to represent spoken dialogues or to provide cues, list etc.  Libre echange &ci siamo provide more use of informative texts poems, many of the exercises involve reading aloud, wheteher of sentences into which the student has inserted words

Use the first language is countenanced in the classroom it can be used to give instructions and explanations to increase L2 practice to link L1 and L2 knowledge firmly together in the students minds to help collaborative dialogue with fellow students and to encourage L2 activities such as code switching for later real life use.

 Audiolingualism & audiovisualism is how the teacher presents the meaning of the language to the students, whether of words, functions & grammatical structures  Most course books provide little help with presentation & acquisition of meaning (pictures of concrete objects are provide & some explanation of grammatical meaning)

 Technique of FonF – focus on form – has brought grammatical explantion back into the classroom as a follow-on from other activities, the discussion in, say, Dougty & williams (1998)

 The loss would be certain amount of genuine communication with the students through the second language, the gain would be not only the students being able follow the instructions more swiftly but also a greater complexity of activities and up wpuld no longer get in the way

 Without going back to undesirable forms of translation activities, the course books could include activities where the students deliberately have to use both languages, say through code switching as in the new concurrent method (jacobson & faltis, 1990)  Explain to each other  check their understanding  Production of language(all in the first language )

 The existing provision of written language in the coursebooks for supporting spoken exercises, as scripts of spoken dialogues as fill in, sentences and forms or as short informative texts, coursebooks need to teach the distinctive feature of the written language, the basic elements of the english writing system in terms of spelling, orthography, direction of writing etc. Need to be built in to the beginners course in one way or another