Lewis Lansford, author of Unlock, continues his look at coursebooks with these helpful tips for applying pedagogy to the ones that don’t necessarily meet the needs of your students.
Sometimes a teacher, a class and a coursebook align perfectly. It’s happened to me. When I taught a ‘factory tour’ class at a manufacturing company in Japan, there was a published coursebook — written by two teachers whose jobs were similar to mine — that was a perfect match. We worked through the book in unit order, from cover to cover. It was a success.
However, that sort of success is rare. Ultimately, a coursebook is only one of the tools in the toolbox, and even when it works well, it’s rarely the only one a teacher needs. The truth is that all too often, teachers find the coursebook to be a creativity-stifling liability.
But what if we flip that around? What if we say that imperfect course books stimulate teachers’ creativity rather than stifle it? Why not take up the challenge of interacting creatively with coursebooks and applying the art of pedagogy — making language input accessible to students for the purpose of learning — and thinking of it as a good thing rather than a bad one? Coursebooks don’t teach classes, teachers do. Knowing what to do with a coursebook — including one you don’t like — is an incredibly useful teaching skill.
Here are six ways teachers can apply pedagogy to the use of coursebooks.
Selection
If you’re lucky, you’ll have some input on which coursebook your class will use. Spend some time looking at the available options. If you can, go to conferences and talk to publishers — and to other teachers — about coursebooks that might meet your students’ needs effectively. When considering your options, remember that ‘fun’ and ‘engagement’ aren’t just nice extras; they’re actually pedagogically sound and can stimulate language learning.
Addition
The factory tour book mentioned above wasn’t the only resource I used in that class. I supplemented and personalised the course with English language promotional material published by the company to help learners talk about their own specific areas of work within the factory. Adding supplementary materials to an already-suitable book gives learners more of the content they need, and it’s targeted directly at them. It also can be a way for you to bring your own personal interests and those of your students into the classroom.
Subtraction
When a coursebook is generally appropriate, but contains some topics that are unsuitable or exercise types that are repetitive, many teachers skip some parts. Often, books are modular — you don’t necessarily need to have used unit 2 before you can use unit 3. A little strategic cutting can remove just the problematic portions while leaving a lot of useful material intact. But be careful. This can be tricky if coursebooks have tests or revision sections that cover multiple units; after subtracting from a coursebook, you may need to do some more addition to make sure you have enough appropriate material for an entire course.
Adaptation
Interacting creatively with a coursebook is a great teaching skill worth practising and developing. If, for example, you don’t want to use the main reading in a unit, but you like the rest of it, find a text you do like and use the reading exercises in the coursebook as a model for your own lesson. Where the book has pre-reading questions, write your own pre-reading questions; where the book has multiple-choice comprehension questions, write your own in that style. This approach will help you understand the architecture of published materials and can help you learn approaches and tricks for writing your own materials.
Replacement
This is an extreme form of adaptation. If you’re forced to use a coursebook that doesn’t work at all, but provides the language your students will be tested on, you can use the coursebook’s grammatical, functional and lexical syllabus but provide your own content for your students to work with. This is an extreme and labour-intensive approach, but if you’re convinced it’s the only way to deliver acceptable classes, it may be worth a try.
Rejection
If you creatively add, subtract, adapt and replace enough, you may end up with a coursebook-based class that’s like the philosopher’s hammer — it’s a hundred years old and has had two new heads and four new handles in its lifetime. That ultimately amounts to rejection of the coursebook. If you’ve come that far, it’s probably time to drop it altogether if you can, go back to ‘selection’ and start the whole creative process all over again.
How do you get on with coursebooks? Have you been lucky enough to experience perfect alignment, or so fed up that replacement led to the creation of materials you were really proud of? I’d love to hear your stories.