Course Books: Friend Or Foe?

Educator Monthly EF’S NEWSLETTER FOR TEACHERS

Issue 7

www.ef.com/teacher

EF Educator Monthly is distributed to teachers in a variety of institutions and teaching environments; some will have a choice of teaching materials, some will have no choice, and yet others will have no course books at all. This month we look at the pros and cons of using course books: how to work with them and how to work without them. The EF Educator Monthly is designed by and for teachers; if you have any suggestions for content or themes for future newsletters, contact the Editor [email protected].

Chris Flint Editor London, UK

Course books: friend or foe? Most institutions today require us to use a particular course book with our classes. There are very good reasons for doing this. Primarily, the course book will act as the syllabus for the course we are teaching. Syllabus design, with all the inherent concerns of staging, grading, ordering and so on is a very complicated and difficult process to get right, so having all of this provided for us by the course book is a great comfort. However, as teachers, we worry about making our lessons learner-centred and catering for the different learning styles and attitudes of our students, so doesn’t the requirement of using a fixed course book for all classes fly in the face of this? Isn’t this trying to use a ‘one size fits all’ solution to different groups of different individuals, each with their own interests and needs? Well, the short answer is ‘no’, but it depends on how you approach your course book. If you approach the book as a text to be followed religiously, each word to be digested and followed in turn, never deviating from the prescribed course, then perhaps the answer would be ‘yes’, but I would advocate a very different approach.

Making the most of the course book We adapt our course books for many reasons: perhaps the particular page we are working on doesn’t provide enough practice for the class in question, or perhaps the particular topic doesn’t excite the interest of the group. Whatever the reason, the principles are the same and can be distilled into the following advice. 1. Supplement, don’t replace. Supplementing means adding to the activities in the course book to better suit the needs of the learners. In principle, we should supplement to provide more than what is in the course book, however, the course book activities are there for a reason and so you should try to include them. 2. Supplementing doesn’t always mean photocopying. Many people think that supplementing means creating or copying worksheets. This is not always the case. Think of how you can include warmers, games, or even DIY exercises and (student-generated) worksheets to add to the book. 3. Don’t follow rubrics slavishly. Just because the course book tells you to do something in one way, it doesn’t mean you have to. Sometimes authors will miss the opportunity, particularly for group and pair work. Doing an exercise in a new and imaginative way can help to lift the book off the page. 4. Have a good reason to do what you are doing. Don’t supplement or adapt merely for the sake of it. Make sure that you have a very good reason for what you are doing and that you are clear about the aims. Not only will this make the activity easier to conduct, but it will make it more interesting for all.

In this issue:  Course books: friend or foe?

 No course book? No problem

Teacher tidbits

As a teacher, and more recently as a course book developer and editor, I would argue that the course book should be seen as a framework on which to hang your lessons and as a springboard for creating rich learning opportunities. It should suit your particular students, in your particular learning environment and at your particular time. And all this can be achieved through the art of supplementing.

5. Change the content, not the exercise. A practical idea for supplementing is to adapt exercises by changing or adding to the content but keeping the same exercise framework and aims. This helps to keep the flow of the course book syllabus intact, but will also help to make the content more relevant to the group and is particularly useful in an ESP context.

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EF Educator Monthly – Issue 7

6. Change the exercise, not the content. Of course, if the content is fine, but the exercise too hard, or not appropriate, then do the opposite and change the exercise not the content. The principle of grading the exercise and not the content makes it easy to cope with multi-level classes. 7. Be careful what you cut. As we saw earlier, the course book is your syllabus. If you are omitting an exercise make sure that it doesn’t present content which is required later. 8. Not everyone has to do everything. An interesting way to adapt a course book is to divide the class into different groups working on different parts of the book. When they have finished, they can present

their work and answers to the rest of the class. This is very good for getting students to think about learning processes. Conclusion In conclusion, although the compulsory course book is a good thing, slavishly following it is not. As you gain experience of the particular book you will gain a sensitivity as to how it may be adapted and supplemented to suit the needs of your learners and how you can move from the ‘one size fits all’ approach to producing a more ‘tailored fit’. Luca Marchiori Development Editor (Efekta) Bournemouth, UK

No course book? No problem Even the most militant advocates of a material-free approach would accept the valuable role course books play in the initial stages of a teacher’s professional development. However, there may eventually come a time when you feel that the books you have at your disposal are insufficient, either in their content, or even in their number. What are your options when, for one reason or another, you have to go without the course book. Let your students find the topics Most modern course books are structured around themes or tasks; themes and tasks which may or may not suit your students at the time. Be bold and let the class establish the topics that will appear in their syllabus. Use the first lesson to talk about their interests through questionnaire and survey tasks: from what they do in their free-time and what’s in the news, to what will affect their lives in the next ten or twenty years. It will be clear from how animated they become, which will make successful lessons in the coming weeks.

Establish your students’ individual objectives It will be important when you come to develop lesson plans that you are aware of what the particular learning needs of your students are. If you are moving away from using a course book, you may as well use the opportunity to tailor the lesson content to their unique purposes: greater fluency, broader vocabulary or better pronunciation. Grammar / Vocabulary / Pronunciation Students will always appreciate the integration of clear and defined language input within the topic-based lesson and without the structure of a course book students are likely to look to you for specific guidance in that regard. It is important to plan and signpost which aspects of grammar, vocabulary or pronunciation work you intend to introduce in each lesson.

Teacher Tidbits Student-generated role-plays from grammar Even if you’re using a course book with plenty of grammar examples, it’s nevertheless valuable to create your own realistic contexts in which the grammar you are covering is used. If you’re not, then presumably that’s part of your planning process anyway and you’ve considered what language might come from the topics and tasks you will set. But when reviewing the work of the previous weeks, what about handing the job to the students? Divide the class into small groups giving each a grammar structure. Ask the groups to invent a roleplay – situation, characters and tasks – which requires them to use their structure. The task can be a simple description of a situation or more sophisticated, with separate role cards for the various characters. Their roleplays can then be passed to another group to perform, without the aid of knowing the original structure.

Differentiation and variety Freeing yourself from the course book allows you to think more about differentiation in task objectives and to incorporate more variety than might be offered in a book’s lesson procedures. The springboards for discussion and activities in course books tend to be reading or listening stimuli created for the level; but grading the task is more appropriate than grading the material, so, within reason, seek out engaging authentic materials. Course book writers are always coming up with new and inspiring ways of motivating teachers and students alike, and it always valuable to return to their books; not least to get ideas for your book-free lessons. As teachers running book-free lessons, we lay down an ongoing challenge to writers to make course books better and more innovative.

There’s more than one way to crack an egg, of course, and it may be that the performers take a different route in completing the task than the writers had originally envisaged; but that itself will provide fertile ground for discussion.

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