In a WeChat group sponsored by Liu Ying, a master of the English language, Professor Chen Li held a scholastic discussion on the topic:how to tailor the textbooks: its principles and methodology. Professor Chen from three perspectives analyzed the question and gave his wonderful answers to this quetion. His answer to this question is: to make them fit for the students, rather than teach in accordance with new teaching concept or teach with textbooks but not teach textboks.
I totally agree with Professor Chen and admire him for his deep thoughts and witty response to the needs of the teachers struggling in classrooms. But, as Chen himself put it, it is not easy for teachers to do so. Many a time they hesitate to do so because they are not sure whether this part or that part should be tailored to make it fit for their own students. on the one hand, they get lost when they are tailoring textbooks; on the other hand, they can't take the responsibility to do so if they happen to miss some important points in the coming exam. All in all, they will feel it hard for them to tailor the textbooks, especially when they consider textbooks as scripture：they think that textbook decide all and they can't and shouldn't make any change on them.
Four conditions that Professor Chen proposed for teachers to tailor textbook are:
1) familiar with curriculum standards;
2) familiare with textbooks and reference books;
3) familiar with the students;
4) familiar with himself.
It's hard just because the four conditions are hard to fulfill. Maybe I'm safe to say many of the teachers have never read curriculum standards before they set out to prepare their lessons and few of them do some investigations on their students' need. I'm still safe to say that none of them have read the textbooks through. In my years of teaching, I have never got a chance to possess a whole set of textbooks, which partially relate to the phenomenon that nome of us have read the textbooks through. When teachers began to share the textbooks for the sake of environment, the possibility to possess a whole set of textbooks has become zero.
In other words, the four conditions sound simple but hard to fulfill and you can imagine how well teachers can tailor textbooks, which, in my opinion, can b compared to a blind man leading the way.
you may have noticed that I use a word tailor which in Oxford English Dictionary is explained as a person whose job is to make men's clothes, especially sb who makes suits, etc. for individual customers and when it is used as a verb, it means to make or adapt sth for a particular purpose, a particular person. You can understand what I mean when I'm using the word "tailor" in this article.
A tailor will make suits for individual customers but a teacher can't make textbooks for individual student. Why can a tailor *** do it? If you imagine how a tailor works, you can understand it. Before he uses his scissors on a piece of cloth, he has measured his customer all around, from height to width, from width to waistline... But it seems hard for a teacher to do so as it becomes complicated all of a sudden when to measure a student's competence and decide what to teach and how to teach. A master of English teaching is just for that can be called a master.
So, let's learn from a tailor!
