Whodunit? Wedunit!
It's not often that we meet up with the people we’re going to interview at Buckingham Palace but that’s what happened in November when we joined Marcos Benevides and Adam Gray at the annual English Speaking Union awards. Marcos and Adam were there as joint-winners of the book award for their innovative title Whodunit. After the event, we met up for a chat.
iT's: So, how do you like your coffee?
Adam Gray: Lots of cream, lots of sugar. Harvey Keitel style.
Marcos Benevides: Black, no sugar. I’m already sweet enough.
iT's: You’ve both just been to Buckingham Palace, where you received the 2010 English Speaking Union book award for your latest book Whodunit. What was it like meeting the Duke of Edinburgh?
M.B.: Surprisingly inspiring, given that I’ve always been pretty indifferent to royalty. I found myself a bit star-struck by Prince Philip. He is quite charming.
 |
| Marcos and Adam holding their award together with High Graham-Marr from their publishing company ABAX. |
A.G.: Quite surreal. Like Marcos, I’ve never put much stock into celebrity, but when the host cried “Silence!” and Prince Philip walked down the middle aisle to the front, I think my sheepish grin was just as sheepish as the other grins.
iT's: Where are you both based and what do you do when you're not writing?
A.G.: For the past three years I’ve been a bilingual elementary school teacher near Dallas. Teaching eight year olds is a full time job mentally, physically, and emotionally, but when I’m not doing that, and when I’m not writing, I’m also in grad school at the University of Texas at Arlington, getting an MA in Educational Policy and Administration. And when I’m not doing any of that, reading and spending time with the family.
M.B.: I teach full time at J. F. Oberlin University in Tokyo. I don’t really consider myself a writer so much as a teacher whose lessons happen to have been published. Everything I’ve published so far comes 100% from what I have done in the classroom. I’ve met writers before who say that the last thing they want to do when their coursebook finally comes out is to use it themselves, but I’m the exact opposite. I can never wait to go and try out the finished version. I start tweaking for a future second edition almost immediately.
iT's: Right, let’s talk about why you were at the Palace. The full title of your book is Fiction in Action: Whodunit, a very interesting blend of coursebook and reader. How did you come up with the idea?
A.G.: Well, as an English language teacher I was never quite satisfied with traditional coursebooks or readers when it came to the teaching of reading and reading skills. Most coursebooks follow an intensive reading approach, so the readings are short and very academic and cover a variety of topics and genres. There are plenty of great books that follow that model, but personally I wanted to engage my students in longer readings that were perhaps more motivating... something like I would want to read as a native speaker. I’d used readers as well, but found it hard to structure a class around them, or to assess the students’ comprehension. We were on break and my wife was in grad school so we couldn’t travel, so I took the laptop down to Starbucks and pounded away. I ended up with the first draft of the first Whodunit story, which I used in my classes during the rest of my time in Japan.
iT's: How is the book organised?
M.B.: There are two graded-reader length stories of six chapters each. In a nutshell, students read a chapter per week and do a couple of pages of embedded puzzles—about ten pages total—and take notes in their “Detective’s Notebook” insert. These notes include new vocabulary as well as clues that they pick up about the crime, suspects’ motives, etc. It’s a bit more challenging and focused than a typical extensive reading approach, but still based on reading for pleasure, unlike more traditional grammar or discrete-skills based approaches.
A.G.: Yes. Also, there are between-chapter activities that they do in class, for example reviewing the main events of the chapter in small groups. They also listen to that chapter’s audio track, which is made to feel like a piece of evidence in the case, such as the ‘actual’ 911 call to the police. Then they take a short vocabulary and comprehension quiz, during which they can refer to their notes but not to the story itself, and then they go off to read the next chapter for homework.
M.B.: We should point out that the audio and the notebook insert are only in the printed version, but they are not necessary components. The eBook version works just as well without them.
iT's: You mention that this book follows a narrow reading approach. Can you explain a little bit about what that is?
A.G.: Basically, the idea is to engage English language learners the same way native speakers are engaged. Texts should be within one genre, or even by just one author. The repetition of plot conventions, vocabulary, and dialogue should help students each time they read another chapter or another book.
M.B.: The “narrow” part refers to a restricted theme, genre or topic. Krashen has a very good, very short essay at http://www.sdkrashen.com/articles/narrow/index.html.
iT's: Adam, why did you choose detective fiction? Do you think you will do other books on different genres?
A.G.: You’re never going to please every student with your selection of texts, but I thought about which genre would please the most people, and came up with mysteries. Plus I knew I could manipulate the giving of clues to help motivate students to answer the puzzle questions. I sincerely hope other genres will work, since later this year Abax will be releasing a lower-level book in the Fiction in Action series—in the fantasy genre. But no vampires, I promise! Or zombies.
iT's: Marcos, you are also interested in task-based learning, and have a blog on the topic. In what way, if any, does Whodunit follow a task-based approach?
M.B.: Well, when I first tried out Adam’s material in my classes, I was fresh from co-authoring my first book, Widgets, which is very much a strong approach to task-based teaching. So it felt natural to push the boundaries of Whodunit in that direction as well. Adam had already included all kinds of clever task-like hooks—for example visual clues in the text, and of course the Detective’s Notebook—so I just took that a step further and said to my students, “Okay, we’re going to do police briefings to discuss the evidence,” or, “Fill out this official police report about the case.”
It also guided us when it came time to produce the later components, like the audio tracks. These are perhaps longer and more natural than one might expect for an intermediate level text, but we felt it was important to maintain that sense of task-like authenticity, which can be more challenging but is ultimately very motivating.
iT's: Of course the other thing that caught the attention of many people, especially in the language teaching blogosphere, was the fact that you released the book under a creative commons license, making it a pay-as-much-as-you-like e-book. How on earth did you convince your publisher?
M.B.: One of the benefits of a small company: They took about a day to decide. The idea itself came because I’m a big fan of Cory Doctorow, who is a vocal proponent of CC licensing and alternative distribution schemes for books. He has been releasing all of his novels as free PDFs as well as through a traditional publisher for years.
By the way, beyond the idea of it being “Some Rights Reserved,” there’s nothing particularly shocking about Creative Commons licensing itself. I think there’s really no reason why any coursebook publisher, big or small, couldn’t use CC licenses for its products.
iT's: How would you judge the success of that experiment? Would you repeat it?
M.B.: Yes, I would. I think it has been very successful in a couple of ways—if you mind the caveat that the parameters of our particular case may not be be the same as those of other projects. For example: In a way, Whodunit is one long ongoing lesson; unlike most coursebooks, there’s very little you can do with just one part of it—you either use the whole thing or nothing. In other words, a teacher would need to photocopy over 150 pages per student, per class, for it to be of much use in most teaching contexts. We feel that this chore alone makes the print edition attractive enough to teachers that we still have something of value to sell.
A.G.: Plus the print edition has a couple of nice extras, like colour illustrations, the notebook insert, and the audio…
M.B.: That’s right. And another point that I’m not sure would be as successful the next time around is that we did it first. That is, there was an inherent publicity angle to our experiment that won’t be there as much the next time someone does it.
In the long term I don’t think there’s any doubt that what we did was successful—but at the same time, I’m not sure I would repeat every aspect of it. Each project brings with it its own challenges; that’s what makes them fun to work on!
iT's: What other changes in book publication and distribution do you foresee in language teaching?
M.B.: Well, the eventual migration of materials to digital formats is a given. Teachers—actually, readers in general—are a conservative bunch, and we often hear things like, “Oh, but printed books smell so nice!” And “Oh, it’s such a tactile experience!” And blah, blah, blah… It reminds me of the creative writing classes I took in the early 90’s, in which my classmates would protest that they just couldn’t be inspired to write on a computer. But do a survey of writers today: I’ll eat a copy of Whodunit if you find more than one in twenty writers who still use pen and paper to write. Mark my words: Books are going the way of the pen—great for presents and for special occasions—or, conversely, to use and discard when on the move. But for every use in between, including in the classroom, a digital platform of some kind will rule.
iT's: And what about you? Now that you’ve won a prestigious award, what can we look forward to from you in the future?
A.G.: Like I said before, a new Fiction in Action book will be ready for Fall 2011. Whodunit is an intermediate level text, and the new one is lower. I’m very happy with the way the stories have turned out. Even those who don’t usually read Tolkien or Harry Potter will enjoy the book.
M.B.: I have two or three potential projects that are each just beginning to crystalize right at the moment, so I’m not entirely sure yet. One, which I started years ago and am really keen to get back to, is a CLIL course for teaching literature to EFL students. I like the fact that it would be very different from both Widgets and Whodunit. It keeps things interesting.
iT's: Thanks very much for taking the time to talk to us.
M.B.: You’re welcome!
A.G.: Thanks for the coffee.
Visit the ABAX website (www.abax.net) for more information about Whodunit.