© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
Teachers' and learners' images for coursebooks
Ian McGrath holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh and is a Senior Lecturer in TESOL in the School of Education, University of Nottingham, where he is Programme Leader for the MA ELT. His interests lie in the fields of programme and materials design and evaluation, including distance learning, with particular reference to teacher education, and he has edited a number of volumes for teacher educators, including Learner Autonomy, Teacher Autonomy: Future Directions (with B. Sinclair and T. Lamb, Longman 2000). His most recent publication is Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching (Edinburgh University Press 2002). He is currently involved in developing e-learning materials for teachers of English in China
Email: Ian.McGrath{at}nottingham.ac.uk
If, as has been widely claimed, our attitudes and beliefs are reflected in the language we use, it should be possible to gain some insight into teachers' views of English-language coursebooks from the metaphors they use to describe them. A small collection of teacher metaphors (and similes), drawn largely from Hong Kong, is presented and discussed. This is then compared with metaphors supplied by secondary school learners in the same context. The conclusion is drawn that there is value in teachers researching their learners' beliefs and attitudes—in relation to coursebooks and other aspects of the teaching-learning environment—and reflecting on and comparing these with their own. Metaphors may be a conveniently economical way of focusing such reflection.