The Place for Coursebooks/Textbooks in the “New Media Age”

Although the advent of new media age has weakened the influence of courbooks/textbooks, it is still necessary that coursebooks/textbooks play an important role in education, especially in courses for majors.

Compared with the online resources, information in textbooks is arranged in a more systematic order, which compact a large amount of fundamental knowledge into pages, presenting a clear line for students to follow or to recollect after absorbing this knowledge. In contrast, the new media age witnesses the vast amount of information pouring upon the students, which is easy to be collected but hard to be recollected from memory, especially when there are lots of hyperlinks extending the scopes of the required knowledge.

Another advantage of the coursebooks/textbooks is that the coursebooks/textbooks are convenient to be carried around and referred to whenever the learners are uncertainty about a particular point of knowledge, while the new media information is only available when particular devices are at hand. For example, if a learner wants to check out the definition of a term, he can either consult a printed coursebook or turn to a CD ROM. However, the only way for him to acquire the information on the CD ROM is to play it in a CD player. Then, what if no CD player is available at that particular moment? Similarly, most new media information is accessible only when the ICT devices are at work. The heavy dependence on these devices like computers, PDA, phone, or tablet PC, etc. decides that new media will never totally replace coursebooks/textbooks, in spite of its increasing popularity.

Moreover, although some digital dictionaries, digital grammarbooks, or media bank are beneficial to learners, it is undeniable that some online resources are not as reliable as expected. Since most learners are not professional enough to identify the misinformation and distinguish the good resources from the bad ones, coursebooks/textbooks on the other hand provide a solid and more reliable information owing to its having been checked, edited and revised times before being published. Additionally, some coursebooks/textbooks recommend considered and trustworthy reference books or online links, which serve as a guideline for learners to do autonomous study and avoid randomly surfing on line and wasting large amounts of time and energy for undesirable results.