Disadvantages Of Using Textbooks Essay

Textbooks have an important role to support the lesson especially for the teacher. It provides a readily available source of ELT materials for teachers to focus on doing the real work of teaching, and not having their energy dispersed by preparation of teaching materials (Edge & Wharton 1998). The way textbook chapters are designed and structured can provide a blueprint of how lessons shall be conducted (Hutchinson & Torres 1994). There are several advantages of using textbook, as follows:
1. Textbooks can also serve as a tool to motivate and stimulate language learning (Allwright 1981, Lee 1997, Skierso 1991).
2. Textbooks can serve as a reference point for teachers managing their teaching progress, and also help to provide a focus for teaching (Tomlinson 2008).
3. One of the major advantages in using

Textbooks provide additional benefits to students as they are an efficient collection of materials for self-accessed learning and for knowledge consolidation.
11. Textbooks can also potentially save learners from teacher’s incompetency and deficiencies (O’Neil 1982, Litz 2005).

The use of text is balance, if there are many advantages of using textbooks there are also disadvantages regarding the use of textbooks.
1. At one extreme, the wide use of textbooks can be seen as an educational failure (Swales 1980). Harwood (2005) attempted to neutralize the situation, based on his 8 review of previous literature, by arguing that there are “Strong” and “Weak” versions of anti-textbook attacks (Harwood 2005:154). Nonetheless, we shall explore the rationale behind the anti-textbook voices to better understand the potential downside of using textbooks.
2. At its worst, the teachers may become totally reliant on the textbook (Ur 1996), and not spend time preparing their lessons (Tomlinson 2008). This would ultimately lead to misleading situation which the teacher “teaches the book” rather than teaching the language itself (McGrath 2002, Reynolds