Review of AS Communication and Culture: The Essential Introduction by Bennett and Slater

Review of A2 textbook

Sample pages
With permission of publishers

Click on cover to see Chapter 6 of book

My copy of the new Communication and Culture book arrived a few days ago and at first glance, it looks a significant improvement on the previous one, "AS Communication Studies: The Essential Introduction".

The use of direct address, rhetorical questions and a chatty conversational tone, with lots of concrete, everyday examples will involve students in a way that more conventional Communication Studies textbooks do not.

The layout, use of colour and register are generally much more student friendly than the previous edition

The activities are learner centred and there is an accompanying website which looks as if it will be good, once it is properly up and running. They already have some little terminology test cards, quizzes and revision tips which would work well with students. The textbook also gives full references at the end of every chapter so that the teacher can research and produce follow-up materials if they wish. In fact, research would be a good word for the approach of this new textbook - it encourages students to take a research approach to the subject - to use all the resources around them - in texts, on the web, in the library etc.

This new book includes the best of the theory from a number of other textbooks ("Between Ourselves", "More Than Words", Introduction to Communication Studies" and "The Pyschology of Interpersonal Behaviour" and Interpersonal Communication) which many of us having been using in the classroom since the old AEB 608 Communication Studies syllabus, in the 1980s. Having it all in one place will be a blessing, both for those new to the course and looking for that one, perfect textbook and to the old hands who are sick of juggling three or four books and getting students to read different bits out of each. You can even use this book selectively with A2 students on the last year of the Communication Studies specification.

The first chapter, introducing the concepts of communication, culture and cultural practice and products is suitably straightforward and necessarily brief. You will be able to get students to read it and then supplement it with lots of class and group activities to reinforce the ideas, especially about cultural products (click here for some suggestions).

The chapter on the textual analysis toolkit is much the same as in the previous text but the following chapter on Practical Analysis and Case Studies is very helpful in allowing students to rehearse the new approach to texts on the new style exam papers – several short answer questions instead of one, wide-ranging analysis question. Those of us with more mixed ability classes will welcome this approach which takes some of the guessing out of what to include in a textual analysis. It also gives teachers some ideas about how to develop their own practice materials. This chapter also encourages students to define ‘text’ in a much broader way than the present Module 2 Textual Analysis paper, incorporating the A2 ideas of clothing, language, cultural products etc.

The chapter on Identity and the Self includes comprehensive sections on Goffman's theory of self presentation and Berne's transactional analysis but well integrated into a discussion of self and identity (as I have tried to do on this website). There is some interesting and helpful discussion about social networking sites and virtual identity in virtual worlds such as Second Life and Habbo Hotel and how the traditional aspects of self – self esteem, self image and self presentation work in these contexts. Your students will enjoy this more up-to-date approach and be able to identify with this way of interacting with others, where perhaps some of their teachers do not!

There is much more detail about language - language and class, language and identity etc. I don't know about you, but I had to produce a separate booklet on my own to cover the requirements of the old specification in terms of language. Fortunately I also teach English Language so I had plenty of tried and tested material to use in the classroom but I am sure some centres would have struggled with this specialist area.

The authors have also not made the mistake of working through how to approach coursework in explicit detail this time - last time there was a whole section which completely misled a number of centres because by the time the textbook came out, the coursework requirements had been considerably revised. There were particular problems with the Review section of the Oral Portfolio for example, with centres being advised, in the textbook to review research methods, the success and failure of the investigation and conclusions and as an afterthought, the oral presentation. As we all know, the Review was supposed to evaluate ONLY the oral presentation! I was an AS Coursework moderator in the first year so observed, firsthand, the effects of trusting a textbook to be in tune with an Exam Board and a particular specification!

However, the chapter on coursework in this new textbook is rather rambling, with a detailed, philosophical justification of the new coursework approach, which I don't always agree with. It does provide lots of sample source material and ideas for coursework titles and encourages students to practice forming titles and ideas before embarking on their final pieces. It does encourage them to explore the ideas on the course widely. It does not encourage them to evaluate source material - to differentiate between useful and not useful or opinion and fact, in fact the authors explicitly say they are not interested in facts but ideas and opinions!

There is also a chapter on the coursework topics – Good/Bad Taste, ‘Speak that I might see you’: Idiolect, “The Writing on the Wall”, “The Songs that saved my life” etc. This chapter will certainly get you started with some ideas but you will want to develop your own stimulus materials and encourage students to share what they find on these topics.

All in all, if I was starting the new AS Communication and Culture specification this September, for the first time, I think I would invest in a copy of this textbook for each of my students. At £18.99 it is not cheap but if it is the only textbook you are going to use, it’s probably worth it. If, like me, you are an old hand, your department already has loads of copies of the old favourites (Between Ourselves etc) and especially if you are a large centre with more than 30 students at AS Level, you may just want to invest in a class set of this new textbook, so that you can use the new sections on culture and the coursework topics. The same advice if you were a new centre in 2000 and bought the old “AS Communication Studies: An Essential Guide” – buy a class set of this new one but do warn your students about the out-of-date section on coursework in their old copies. However, in the final analysis, I guess as the old cliché says, “The proof of the pudding will be in the eating”!

Do email me and let me know what you think of the book and I will add your comments to this page.