Blast from the Past

A review of McClosky, M. & Stack, L. (1996). Voices in Literature. Bronze level. Boston: Heinle & Heinle. 200pp., 5 units.

As part of my studies in English and ESL, I often come across various textbooks which I'm called upon to review. While I do have some I can recommend, I occasionally find it useful to look at the opposite end of the spectrum, and explore some of the “don'ts” of ESL instruction. I recall this review I found for what turned out to be a real doozy of an ESL text.

In defense of this book, I will point out that its date of publication was 1996 – which goes a long way to show how far the field of ESL education has come. I have no idea whether or not this text is still in use anywhere in the country, but if it is, I urge teachers to remove it form their ESL curricula and move it over to history – for indeed, its greatest use now is as a relic of a past time.

This book appears to be for a grammar/middle school level, best suited for students at WIDA level 3, Developing. It comes with an audio cassette but no online component – hardly surprising considering how old the book is.

Some of the topics and themes may be a bit much for students at this grade and proficiency level, including The Diary of Anne Frank or an essay on WWII Navajo code talkers, but the book provides a fair amount of pre- and -post-reading exercises to help students put the content into a meaningful perspective. There's very little explicit language/vocabulary instruction in the book, which seems to make great assumptions about students' prior knowledge. Without explicit language instruction, it's difficult to say how exactly it would be integrated into content instruction, which is what the book focuses on. As many of the questions are either open-ended or focus on group work, there's not much objective material here to aid in evaluation or assessment.

The book, being a language through literature book, emphasizes reading and writing skills. Language functions are simple, including describing a scene or giving recitations of facts. There is actually very little guided language instruction in the book, with only minimal vocabulary introduced and no grammar exercises at all. Content instruction seems to overshadow language instruction at every step, sometimes at the expense of language. For example, after the essay about WWII Navajo code talkers, students are encouraged to write their own codes – an exercise which seems to me counterproductive to teaching standard English.

The book's exercises are few, seemingly random, and focus more on content than on any specific language skills. The exercises tend heavily to involve pair or group work, which provides students to practice language in hands-on settings – practice what, however, is something of a mystery because the book offers little to no guidance in language instruction. Students are expected to answer comprehension questions after each story, as well as other exercises such as filling in knowledge charts or adding captions to illustrations. The variety of exercises (too much variety; it seems too random) at least insures that some students' learning styles will fare better than others. The random range of exercise types, as well as the emphasis on group work, at least serve to differentiate instruction, as less-proficient students can seek aid form their more-proficient peers.

The book is well illustrated, relying primarily on hand-drawn illustrations with the occasional photograph of a scene or author. There is enough imagery and realia to promote understanding of the stories and essays in question, but as the book is somewhat dated, so are the images – the clothing and props shown in the pictures seems a bit out of date. There are, at least, enough representations of different cultures – from Hispanic to Asian to Latin American – that ESL students are likely to identify with.

I was very disappointed in this book – in fact, I repeatedly found myself checking the introduction and contents to insure that it was, in fact, an ESL textbook, and not a mainstream book that I had picked up in error. It is the oldest book I've reviewed, and its numerous shortcomings illustrate just how far ESL education has come in 15 years. This book needs much more explicit language goals, and needs to incorporate them into the content of the stories it presents. Simply having the students emulate activities in the book – for example, having them describe their own family after a story with a family theme – is not enough, and accomplishes little in ESL education. The exercises are a confusing mishmash with very little logic or organization behind them. I'd be hard pressed to even recommend this book for a mainstream literature class, let alone for the unique needs of an ESL student body. It's simply too far behind the times to be of much value.