English Language Teaching Textbooks: Content, Consumption, Production

‘ELT textbook research is on the rise’ writes Nigel Harwood in the Introduction to this new collection. It is true: this book is one of a number that have come out in the last year or so (see, for example, Garton and Graves 2013; Gray 2013; Tomlinson 2013); an overdue response, perhaps, to the fact that so many teachers’ professional lives are, if not dominated, at least mediated, by published textbooks (accounting for up to 90 per cent of classroom time, according to one of Harwood’s sources). As Akbari (2008: 647) notes, ‘What the majority of teachers teach and how they teach [...] are now determined by textbooks’. Despite this, we still know little about their actual effectiveness in terms of learning outcomes, and it is curious, to say the least, that textbooks rarely if ever feature in discussions of factors that influence second language acquisition (SLA). Ellis (2008), in over 1,000 pages, makes no mention of them. Nor do Doughty and Long (2003). A novice teacher might be forgiven for wondering why, with so much of her waking life devoted to preparing and delivering coursebook-based lessons, their impact on language learning should be of such scant interest to researchers.