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Ensuring social relevance 255 Reflective task 11.4
How would you define or describe “socially relevant teaching materials”? If you are given prescribed textbooks selected by your school authorities or by outside agencies, what are the ways in which you can adapt them to suit your social context?
The Use of Appropriate Teaching Materials
Textbooks are not a neutral medium. They represent cultural values, beliefs, and attitudes. They reflect “a social construction that may be imposed on teachers and students and that indirectly constructs their view of a culture. This aspect often passes unrecognized” (Mar- tin Cortazzi and Lixian Jin, 1999, p. 200). Critical recognition of the hidden cultural values embedded in centrally produced textbooks is a prerequisite for ensuring social relevance in the L2 classroom.
Textbooks, to be relevant, must be sensitive to the aims and ob- jectives, needs and wants of learners from a particular pedagogic setting. However, because of the global spread of English, ELT has become a global industry with high economic stakes, and textbook production has become one of the engines that drives the industry. It is hardly surprising that the world market is flooded with text- books not grounded in local sociocultural milieu.
It is very common, as Sandra McKay (2000, p. 9) points out, to see teacher and students coming from the same linguistic and cul- tural background, but use textbooks that draw heavily on a foreign culture, as in the case of classrooms in Thailand or in Korea where local teachers use materials written in the United States or Great Britain. She cites two examples to bring out such a cultural anomaly. A Korean student experienced difficulty in using a U.S.-published textbook when he was teaching in Korea. One of the exercises in- structed students to look at photographs of various events in Amer- ican history and decide the decade in which the picture was taken! In another example, she talks about a lesson on garage sales in the United States. She rightly observes that those from cultures that have garage sales wouldn’t think twice about it, while those from other cultures might be puzzled. She wonders whether students from an- other culture “would be surprised and perhaps offended by the idea of buying used mattresses, sheets, blankets and underwear” (p. 9).