By Hugh Dornan
For the past several years, I have been teaching at the Kyoto University of Advanced Science campus in the mountains of Kameoka, Kyoto. Speak Now 4 has been a useful tool for more than a few reasons – not least, for fighting off all manners of beasties that fly in through the windows around summer. Having had to spring into action on a number of occasions to protect my screaming students from hornets and other pests, this textbook was a good tool for fighting off those things, as well as for helping my students improve upon their English, too!
Is Speak Now 4 the greatest textbook ever created? Or is it a complete mess? Please continue reading if you want to find out!
Speak Now 4 is the last in a four-book series ranging from beginner to intermediate level. The textbook is designed to develop students’ communication skills, with most units consisting of a vocabulary, reading, and a listening and pronunciation section. Each part also comes with a language booster section that introduces some key phrases or expressions, making it a good all-around textbook that covers all the key components for learning English.
The textbook is organised into 8 chapters and 32 units that are broken down into the following sections: Careers, People, Socialising, Lifestyles, Feelings, Travel, Pop Culture, and In The News. I believe these topic choices by the authors are appropriate and cover topics that students will be able to talk about in conversations with English speakers in possible future situations.
There are listening exercises based on the printed conversations in the textbook that students can use to listen for pronunciation, for those students who want to improve their pronunciation, intonation, and stress during class pronunciation practice or for self-practice at home. One good point about these listening exercises is that they use a variety of different accents from native and non-native English speakers. I thought this was great, as it gives the students a chance to listen to various accents, instead of just the North American accents that are heard in most textbook audio tracks. This is because most English speakers that Japanese students come across will be from countries like the Philippines, Korea, China, and Indonesia, using English as a second language. As these nations are geographically close, a large number of tourists or business travelers visit Japan. To paraphrase Seghbosyan, allowing students to be exposed to variations of English and a variety of accents will assist them in a multitude of situations, be they business or private (2021).
The textbook has a very clean layout and design. It’s easy for the students to read and the sections have a well-arranged flow to follow. Students then know what to expect in each chapter. The textbook achieves this by going for a minimalistic approach, making good use of white space to make a visual separation between elements and to improve readability. It also avoids excess use of colours and images that can distract learners, and also by ensuring consistent alignment throughout the text to reinforce the content, it thus creates a visual harmony of sorts to help readers.
There are also eight videos, one for each chapter, that can be watched in the online practice section. Each video is based on the chapter’s topic and lasts for two to three minutes. They give the students an opportunity to watch the speaker’s body language, gestures, and how they move their mouths when speaking. These are things they wouldn’t be able to get from listening to audio.
And finally, the textbook also has an online self-assessment section that students can log into using a code on the back of their textbook. This should be simple to do, however, some students and colleagues have had issues with the site not being intuitive, or other cases of not being able to sign in. If these could be resolved, then it would make both students and teachers much more satisfied with utilising self-assessments and other online tools.
I used Speak Now 4 over the course of two full 15-week semesters. I used it for a reading and pronunciation class for third-year students at KUAS in a 90-minute weekly class. There may have been better-suited textbooks for this class, but for the students’ abilities, it seemed suitable. This is due to the fact it was challenging enough for intermediate-level students, while not being overly difficult for the lower intermediate-level students, with a good balance of speaking, listening, and reading. I used the audio recordings at the beginning of the class to let students listen to pronunciation, stress, and intonation. A 20-year-old female student mentioned the layout was pleasing to the eye and had an easy-to-follow structure. A 21-year-old male student said the topics were quite interesting and relatable for learners his age. Finally, a 21-year-old female student said there was a problem with some units being too easy while proceeding units could be quite challenging, and then units would become easier again.
To use weightlifting as an analogy, if you lift the same weight every day, after a point your muscles won’t develop anymore. The same can be said about studying a language like English where one needs to be challenged in order to improve. Despite accolades from some of my students, this textbook‘s content can be seen as superficial. This may seem like a disadvantage but could allow the teacher to expand when needed or elicit content from students. Teachers who are using the book for a speaking class where there is an emphasis on student talk time will need to expand on what’s included in the textbook with, for example, supplementary handouts of extra phrases and expressions based on those in the book.
So, to conclude, Speak Now 4 is a useful tool to expose students to an even mix of speaking, listening, reading, and useful phrases and expressions without being too difficult. For those who teach intermediate or lower-intermediate level students, this is a decent resource to use. However, it would be better if the material became more challenging as students progressed through the book. This would then help avoid stagnation and allow the students to push themselves more to advance their English. Providing students with some higher-level idioms, vocabulary, and a more detailed audio track, could help improve the students’ English abilities even more as they progress through the textbook.
References
Seghbosyan, A. (2021, October 2). Varieties of English: Why is it important for students to know that? SkyTeach. https://skyteach.ru/2021/02/10/ varieties-of-english-why-is-it-important-for-students-to-know-that/
Speakeasy 