Green Standard Schools for Teachers

There are all sorts of reasons why printed course books should no longer be in use. To begin with, there is the environmental cost.  It takes around 20 litres of water to manufacture one A4 sheet of paper. That means well over 2,000 litres are needed to manufacture the paper required for the average course book. A similarly large amount of energy is needed to produce the paper, print all the pages, stick them together, and then ship them around the world. And predictably enough, not all the energy required will have been generated from renewable resources, meaning that every course book produced also generates a carbon footprint.

Then there are the limitations of the medium itself. Printed words just lay there on the page, as inanimate as carvings on a rock. Of course they can still be instructive; students can read the words, look at the pictures, and tackle a variety of different exercises, but none of these paper-based activities can talk back to the students; they don’t indicate what students have learnt, or what they might have missed; they offer nothing approaching genuine, real-time interaction. 

What’s more, course books are impossible to update or improve quickly and easily, and are often on their way to becoming out of date before they arrive in our schools.

Despite these fairly obvious limitations, the simple truth is that the vast majority of teachers and learners still rely on paper-based textbooks to guide them through their language course. There are probably various reasons why this is the case. The most obvious ones are:

• course book publishers can make a very good return on their investment and are reluctant to let this lucrative business fade away;

• both teachers and students still like to have something tangible to hold, to keep, and to refer to. 

These are the same basic reasons that explain why paper-based books of any description still exist, when it is clearly both cheaper and more environmentally friendly to publish everything in a digital format. (There are still some parts of the world where people don’t have access to digital devices and/or the Internet, but as far as the majority of language learners is concerned, especially adult language learners in Europe, this hasn’t been an issue for decades.)

These days almost every printed text book is accompanied by a range of supplementary digital resources, including interactive activities, video and audio files, etc. and in some cases, the entire text book is also available in digital format. But access to these digital resources is invariably dependent on having first purchased the printed version of the course book. 

Organisations that only provide Web-based study materials for language learners have been around for decades while the number of apps designed specifically for language learners has exploded in the last 5-6 years. Despite all these developments, the vast majority of language learners attending a course at a recognised language teaching institution (whether public or private) will still follow a published, paper-based course book. So a key question to ask ourselves is this: how do all these course books deal with the subject of environmental sustainability?