I find it amazing that in a country where many parents spend 25% or more of their income of their children’s education (including English education), and where English education is a huge industry, that there are so many obvious mistakes in the textbooks. Basic things like prepositions and spelling of vocabulary words are sometimes wrong. These are not easily explained away as typos.
Even in the Sing Along book, full of English children’s songs like Row, Row, Row Your Boat, and such, there are mistakes. But in there the mistakes are musical rhythms that are written wrong. I know small children may not know the difference usually, but several of my kids get confused because the song they hear on the CD doesn’t match the one musically written on the page. Most of the songs they already know the tunes of, only with Korean words, so they may have seen the correct notes elsewhere. For me, it’s just annoying.
What’s worse is when one of the other teachers fills in the answers in her book, and then I have to correct it. I feel bad, and only say something when I must. She even looks in her grammar books and in the answer keys as she’s filling in the blanks, which makes me question whether those are correct or not.
Some schools (the bigger chains of hagwons) have their own line of books (as we do), and they employ native speaking editors to help write them and comb through them for mistakes (which we must not). What a novel idea.
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