CHAPTER 2. Communicative Language Teaching 37 initiating and directing learning activities (which was now done in the study guides) to monitoring learning activities (Westho , 1996). A large part of the available contact time was allocated for this work on the study guide (language practice), which was o en organized as part of group work and only needed non-experts (teacher assistant or fellow teachers) to safeguard the fact that all students followed their study guide. Unfortunately, this learner-centered approach favored written assignments, decreasing the amount of target language use and the time spent on oral skills. e emphasis on learning competences of the learner and the distant teacher made learning resources more and more important. As a result, educational publishers became increasingly important and were in uenced by this learner-centered educational practice to design appropriate course materials. DUTCH TEACHERS’ WORKLOAD AND THE INFLUENCE OF PUBLISHERS e relatively high workload of Dutch teachers might additionally encourage the use of these coursebooks which, by nature, are typically structure-based. As a result, FLT programs in schools are assumed to be heavily in uenced by educational publishers rather than SLA research (Tomlinson, 2016). Although these publishers may have access to knowledge provided by SLA research, they are claimed to be guided by commercial interests and will prioritize content which sells. e in uence of publishers is still growing in the Netherlands because schools have to apply European procurement procedures when choosing course materials. Educational publishers o er contracts, and schools usually prefer the cheapest options. As a result, schools are typically contractually obliged to use coursebooks, and there is no room or need for teachers to design their own materials. Still, the textbooks do o er reading texts and listening exercises which could be used for exposure, and there are a few teachers (see Rousse-Malpat, 2019) who use the target language almost exclusively during class time. In her investigation comparing students of French in the Netherlands who were taught using a mostly target language approach versus those who were not, Rousse-Malpat (2019) found the target language students to clearly outperform their counterparts who were taught the foreign language mainly through the medium of the L1 in both speaking and writing. Still, these high-exposure learners were less pro cient than those who were taught using the Accelerated Integrated Method (to be discussed below). Unfortunately, most FFL teachers in the Netherlands prefer to spend most of the classroom time explaining grammar in the L1 (cf. West and Verspoor, 2016) for reasons outlined above. Another longitudinal study that shows that it may not be the textbook itself but how teachers choose to use it was conducted by Piggott (2019). In her dissertation, she compared two cohorts of students of English over the course of two years using the same English textbook taught by the same team of teachers, but in the experimental group
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