McMillan Textbooks are designed for all schools worldwide

Newspaper “24 Hours” 5^th of October

Nino Barabadze

Like the schoolchildren of Europe, Asia and the US, the Georgian schoolchildren will have opportunity to study English with the McMillan Textbooks from the 2011-2012 academic year. McMillan publishing house is the leader in printing the digital educational materials. Before introducing the textbooks to the schools, English Language teachers have been trained properly and provided with the relevant supplementary manuals, audio and visual materials.

Until recently, only few schoolchildren had opportunity to study with McMillan textbooks which were quite expensive, as a result of the negotiations conducted with the publishing house, the McMillan offered the textbooks to the Ministry in a special price;- 10 GEL per book.

Some people started to speculate over the quality of these textbooks. They argued that the handbooks were not primarily designed for Georgian schoolchildren.

The Minister, Dimitri Shashkini comments on the quality of these textbooks and their relevance for Georgian schoolchildren.

Mr. Minister, could you tell us how the McMillan textbooks have been introduced to Georgian schools?

This year, a process of the textbooks’ approval was carried out in the most transparent manner,  In 2010, we announced a competition on the textbooks of I-IV grades, during the year, I held numerous meeting with the publishers, some of them demanded that if the Ministry intervened in the activities of the publishing houses, they would boycott against the textbook approval contest announced by the Ministry. Though, in the end, the majority of the publishers entered into a constructive dialogue with the Ministry.

In regard to the English Language textbooks, we announced an open competition. Only McMillan textbooks passed the approval procedures. All textbooks were evaluated by the anonymous experts. The English Language handbooks designed by Georgian authors were not in compliant with the approval standards because of the lack of the quality. Georgian distributors of the Cambridge textbooks offered a bribe to the staff of the Ministry in order to “help” them to become a monopolist in the fair. Everybody saw on the TV, that the Georgian distributors of the Cambridge textbooks were detained.

And still, some experts do not like the McMillan textbooks..

It is a paradox, those people who used to work in the Ministry and participated in the process of the textbooks’ approval, started to criticize a new rule of the books’ approval, now, we are working on correcting the mistakes committed by them.  Native English teachers who came to Georgia as a part of the educational program” Teach and Learn with Georgia”  mentioned numerously that the old textbooks were inappropriate for instruction of the English language at schools.

To convince the McMillan publishing house to come to the Georgian market, I personally conducted the negotiations with them, I spoke to them about the current educational reform and its main directions one of which is strengthening of instruction of English language.

McMillan has trained Georgian teachers free of charge, though there are some teachers who claim that the textbooks do not meet the modern standards:

This is true; McMillan publishing house spent around 2 million GBP on teachers’ training and purchasing the textbooks for them.

3000 teachers were trained this summer. During these trainings, we met some teachers whose level of competence in English language was low, they were only familiar with the textbooks designed back in the 80s, and the texts in these handbooks were followed by Russian transcription.

Some teachers also say that these handbooks are Russian market oriented

It is known that there are two standards of the language: native and foreign language. The methods of instruction varies for each of them, English language textbooks designed by the McMillan are widely used for the instruction of English as a foreign language worldwide. I think that Georgian schoolchildren are as talented as the students of any other country and they should have opportunity to study with McMillan textbooks, there is no need of elaborating a separate handbook for a specific country.

Some “experts” claim that the textbooks are oriented on Russian market because they feature photos of Kremlin, Eifel etc. Russia has occupied 20% of Georgia’s territory, this is the fact but it is also truth that Kremlin is historic complex and we can’t deny its existence.

We have already announced a competition of the textbooks for VII-XII grades, I don’t have preferences for any author or group of author’s – our goal is to administer the contest in impartial, ethical and fair manner.