Pathways 2: Listening, Speaking, and Critical Thinking
Becky Tarver Chase and Kristin L. Johannsen, 2012
National Geographic Learning and Heinle Cengage Learning

Listening and speaking skills are essential when learning a second or foreign language because many students’ goals are to become orally competent in a variety of settings. ESL and EFL students need to engage with material that is interesting, engaging, and culturally relevant when teaching these skills in order to remain motivated and interested while learning another language. Additionally, the integration of oral communication skills (i.e., listening and speaking skills, in addition to receptive and productive pronunciation skills) allows the skills to complement one another (Murphy, 1991). When choosing a listening and speaking textbook for a class, there are many considerations such as the needs of a teacher, a group of learners, and a particular curriculum (see Byrd, 2001).

Pathways 2: Listening, Speaking, and Critical Thinking is a textbook that centers around multicultural topics that are meant to engage students in meaningful communication as they develop toward learning academic English. The units integrate skills by requiring students to listen to recordings about the main topics and interact with their peers during cooperative work and class discussions. Pathways comprehensively addresses many aspects of listening and speaking instruction, and on the whole, the textbook may fit well in an intensive English program (IEP) or an English for academic purposes curriculum

Context

Pathways includes varied subject matter relating to cultural, scientific, business, and global themes. The book consists of 10 units: health, energy, culture, water, the brain, food, Earth science, ancient civilizations, endangered species, and business and economics. These topical themes seem to be selected for their variety, their potential to teach academic and communicative vocabulary, and their appeal to a global audience while providing relevant cultural information. Each thematic unit includes two lessons focused on vocabulary development, listening skills, grammar development, speaking skills, viewing skills, and critical thinking skills. For example, Unit 7 focuses on Earth science, opening with a large, colorful picture of an exploding volcano. This image helps draw learners’ attention to the new theme while explaining the process that causes volcanoes and earthquakes. Other units, such as Unit 5, “Inside the Brain,” feature thought-provoking images, as seen by the man whose head is covered by wires to monitor his brain activity.

Sequencing

Many aspects of the textbook are presented in a logical manner. As far as the sequencing of grammar instruction, Unit 2, “Energy and Our Planet,” focuses on the present tense and progresses to the past tense and passive voice in Units 3 and 4. By the end of the book, the instruction focuses on more complex grammatical constructions, such as the present perfect tense. Largely, this progression of grammar instruction seems logical to the reviewers. Another important part of listening and speaking skills is pronunciation. In Pathways, pronunciation is presented in the Listening Skills section of each unit. As far as the progression of the pronunciation instruction, Unit 1 begins with instruction on a segmental feature (i.e., plural endings), and it progresses to focus on suprasegmental features such as word stress, intonation, and thought groups. Focusing on segmentals may be helpful to ease students into pronunciation instruction because students may be familiar with these orthographic linguistic features.

With regard to the book’s structure, the exercises in Pathways follow a typical progression for lesson planning. Using Unit 4, “A Thirsty World,” as an example, the unit begins by asking students to activate and build background knowledge about a particular topic. From there, the book introduces exercises to teach salient vocabulary in the “Building Vocabulary” and “Using Vocabulary” sections. Next, the “Developing Listening Skills” section features pre-, during-, and post-listening activities to promote the use of specific skills such as listening for main ideas and details. Interestingly, only the “Listening for Main Ideas” section has a multiple-choice question; possibly this is in reaction to the criticisms against the comprehension approach that Field (2008) mentions (i.e., multiple-choice questions can be more difficult to understand than a listening passage itself). Instead of providing multiple-choice questions, the “Listening for Details” section asks students to complete a note-taking task, and the “After Listening” section asks students to complete a graphic organizer. The listening passages feature both female and male speakers who speak at an adjusted rate and with clear enunciation to facilitate comprehension. The book finally includes exercises to further develop students’ critical thinking skills by incorporating the listening content information into an activity which requires students to form their own opinions about the listening topic.

Visual Presentation

Pathways contains an incredible amount of visual appeal and provides multiple supplemental viewing sections each unit. Due to the collaboration between Heinle Cengage Learning and National Geographic Learning, Pathways features many vivid images that presumably come from the photography archives of National Geographic magazine. For instance, each unit opens with a “Think and Discuss” section consisting of a full-page photo and discussion questions. This page encourages students to make initial predictions about the unit’s topic, which serves to activate the students’ background knowledge and establish a context for the upcoming listening activities, both of which are helpful for developing top-down strategies for listening comprehension. Throughout the remainder of each unit, smaller photographs highlight specific aspects of the unit’s content. Each photograph is particularly detailed, well framed, authentic, and features people and places from all over the world. Finally, each unit includes a “Viewing” section, featuring an authentic video produced by National Geographic. Some videos are accessible on National Geographic’s website, but others are available on the textbook’s accompanying DVD.

This viewing material appears to acknowledge that English language learners do not exclusively practice their listening skills in isolation. That is, learners often encounter spoken texts in tandem with paralinguistic information that may be provided both in person and through visual information. Ishihara and Chi (2004) cite literature and research supporting the claim that videos can appeal to learners’ multiple senses, facilitate comprehension, and increase motivation. Overall, these viewing materials are an asset for Pathways that makes the textbook stand out compared to other listening texts.

Conclusion

As a textbook, Pathways is quite comprehensive. Teachers may not need to look beyond the book for skills and content-related material, but teachers may wish to find ways reframe the suggested activities for particular learning contexts. In Unit 4, for instance, rather than having students use a dictionary to look up vocabulary words to match with their definitions, a teacher could type the words and definitions on separate slips of paper and have students find their partners in the classroom. Also, the “Independent Student Handbook” included at the end of the textbook adds to the book’s comprehensiveness. This section provides strategies to help students further develop listening skills, vocabulary building, speaking skills, and visual interpretation skills. Teachers may want to incorporate parts into their lessons or as homework as a way to help students become autonomous learners. However, due to the presentation of the strategies in expository and bulleted prose, a teacher may need to scaffold the strategy instruction to make the input more comprehensible for learners. It is also worth noting that the textbook is linguistically dense, despite the abundance of photographs. The photo-spreads include captions and questions, and the exercise pages contain little space between activities. The sheer amount of text subtly emphasizes reading skills and could seem overwhelming to students at the low-intermediate level. In the end, Pathways’strengths are its visual appeal thanks to its photographs and its comprehensive inclusion of content related to the development of listening and speaking skills.

References

Byrd, P. (2001). Textbooks: Evaluation and selection and analysis for implementation. In M. Celce-Murcia (Ed.),

Teaching English as a second or foreign language (3rd ed., pp. 415–427). Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.

Field, J. (2008). Listening in the language classroom. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Ishihara, N., & Chi, J. C. (2004). Authentic video in the beginning ESOL classroom: Using a full-length feature film for listening and speaking strategy practice. English Teaching Forum, 42(1), 30–35.

Murphy, J. M. (1991). Oral communication in TESOL: Integrating speaking, listening, and pronunciation. TESOL Quarterly, 25, 51–75.