Meet Tony from Canada and Julia from the United States on the left, and Kwan and Lucy on the right... Which pair feels less phony to you?
Last year I posted an account of a post-unplugged coursebook unit which featured a stock photo thrown in to 'decorate' the main dialogue. Scott Thornbury, in his helpful response to the post, made a quip about the stock photo, and I thoroughly agreed with his view that it somehow rendered the presentation rather less than "authentic" (though in fact the dialogue itself was built around authentic discussions that had occured in my classroom).
In using that stock photo and reflecting after Scott's comment, it occurred to me that I have always been more than a little uncomfortable about using photographs of people in course materials. As in, stock photographs of nameless people to which we add names, ages, nationalities, occupations and often even interests or feelings.
It isn't so bad with photographs of places or things (because in most cases these are the real McCoy -- or "a drappie o' the real MacKay" if we were to stick with the original usage), but with people it just doesn't work for me. I see photographs of people lined up with dialogues, listening samples and reading passages, in which they are given particular personas, and I think "Gosh that just looks so painfully fake and contrived."
Interestingly, I don't get anywhere near the same sensation when I see sketches and illustrations of what are clearly fictional characters.
The coursebook I used to learn Japanese when I was 14 was fully black and white, with occasional photographs of places, and all people or characters done as simple sketches. In university, while learning Swedish, our coursebook was also fully black and white and everything (places, things and people) was depicted with simple line drawings. And when I was studying Korean independently, I had a two-tone coursebook with very elegant and simple sketches comprising the illustrations.
In all of my own learning experiences, with limited colour and just sketches and line-drawings of characters, I never got the impression of "fake/phony" because it was clear that, while based on simplified (sometimes even "archtype") characterisations of people, they were never meant to represent authentic living and breathing people in the real world.
Coursebooks nowadays are chockers with photographs of "real people" in the quest to come across as being more authentic and more interesting. There is also usually some subtle persuasion going on with the depiction of "real" people of different nationalities and skin colours, to somehow create a sense that learners themselves are being recognised through the coursebook photography.
I just don't think it works.
Learners I've spoken to about it clearly indicated it doesn't work all that well for them, either.
If photographs of people (with fake/contrived names and background information) don't come across all that well, why dedicate the (considerable) expenses and page space to featuring them?
Could we possibly be doing something more useful with that space?
=D
