The role of textbook amid a pandemic year: the experience report of teaching English in a public professional school in Fortaleza

Abstract

Textbooks have multiples roles in teaching-learning processes. The roles that can be identified start from useful framework for a classroom to a guide in helping less experienced teachers. However not all perspectives about textbooks are positive. There is some criticism pointing to the lack of autonomy and spontaneity which they can promote in a classroom. Recently, a new perspective was added to this discussion about the textbooks’ roles. The change was due to the pandemic context and the new social distance rules which led to the distance learning format. In this scenario textbooks portrayed different roles simultaneously as not all schools and students could access the online platforms. Thus, in some contexts they were essential and the only tool for some students while in others they continued to serve as a supporting guide which assisted to design and adapt the contents and classes to new platforms. This paper aims to identify some of these aspects and reflect briefly about how the role of textbooks changed amid the pandemic year of 2020 from a personal experience report. Some authors give support to the ideas developed in this paper: Tomlinson (2005), Cunningsworth (2008), Hutchinson (1994) and Richards (2001). Textbooks are still a valuable and reliable input to teach and learning a foreign language, either as protagonist or supporting resource in a public school. The advent of a context in which other materials are required to intermediate the educational process do not exclude the textbooks presence.