The Use of Literature in Course Books & Course Book Evaluation

Course Book: Headway Advanced Student’s Book (5th Edition)

Unit: 2 – “In so many words”

Literary Text: George Bernard Shaw’s play named Pygmalion (Act II Scene 1 and Act III)

The Text:

Act II Scene 1

Act III

Activities in the Book:

I think this text is based on the “text as object” viewpoint as there is no meaningful interaction between the text and students where they can express their previous knowledge and general intelligence. Questions are mostly focused on comprehension and the language itself. Also, there is only one pre-reading question that asks students to make a prediction regarding the possible events that will happen in Act III of the play.

I think that these activities are not really effective enough except for the 5 and 7. In activity 5, students can at least share their predictions and thoughts by looking at the list of characters. So, they can warm up and get ready to read the text. In activity 7, students are not answering comprehension check questions and actually practicing what they have learned with a partner.

In terms of personalization, these activities are deeply insufficient. As I stated above, the activities are checking students’ comprehension. Therefore, students cannot share their ideas, feelings, preferences, and opinions, and cannot really engage with the literary text in a meaningful way.

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My Activities:

As for pre-reading questions, I would ask:

• What do you think about accents (whether in Turkish language or English language)? Do you have any accent that you particularly like?

• Do Turkish people have different accents & dialects across Turkey? Why?

• Do you think accents can create discrimination between people?

• What do you think about accents that belong to specific societies? Can they express their power or status?

• Would you take a speech lesson to have a specific accent in order to fit in?

• Have you ever heard about someone who studied to have an accent? Is there any novel, story, poem, or play about this topic in Turkey?

• Would you care if the person you speak to had a different accent or pronunciation than you?

• Would you avoid someone just because of the way he/she speaks or looks different than you?

As for post-reading questions, I would ask:

• Would you change anything if you were the author of this play?

• Would you add or remove any character? Why?

• If you were in the shoes of Eliza, how would you react to Colonel Pickering?

• What do you think would be different if this play was written by someone else in another country?

• Imagine the characters as Turkish who live in 2022 and try to re-write the play. (We can ask students to role-play the re-written play, as well.)

• If these characters had a social media account -Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.-, what would they share? (We can give students empty templates that have an outline of those social media platforms.)

• If you were Professor Higgins, would you accept to transcribe the speech of a flower-girl and give her speech lessons?

• What would it look like if the class distinctions were too severe or no longer exist in this play? How about real life?

• Which background music/song would be suitable in this play?

• If you could give a new title to this play, what would it be? Why?

I think this literary text does not remain a text anymore with these effective questions/activities as I mainly focused on personalization along with encouraging students to practice the language more than before.