It’s odd that the big textbook companies have held dominion over our profession for so long. It’s even more odd how the annual ACTFL conference, in spite of their statements about proficiency and use of the language in the classroom, has become merely an outlet, a big book sale, for corporate book and other (proven fairly useless) tech materials for language teachers.
In this series of nine articles, Robert Harrell has raised some questions for the textbook companies. The questions he asks, in my mind, spell the demise of corporate interests in language instruction. The question is not if these companies will eventually lose their stranglehold on us, it’s when it will happen, as we slowly, one by one, learn what real language teaching really entails.