Adapting the coursebook 2

Well, I think there are many advantages to coursebooks, and a good coursebook should help and support the teacher, should make your teaching easier.

Coursebooks have a carefully worked out language syllabus, so they cover the main areas of the language, and they also have – or they should have – exercises which work so they provide plenty of language practice. And these are things which are usually quite difficult for the teacher to provide. Most teachers don’t have time to make up their own exercises, for example.

But there are also ways in which the coursebook can be quite restricting or quite limiting for the teacher, and I think one problem is that in a coursebook everything is written down on the page, so you have the pictures, the texts, the exercises – it’s all on the page. So students using the book usually have their heads down and they’re not looking up at the teacher or looking at each other.

And I think another problem with coursebooks is that many coursebooks anyway are written for several different countries or several different parts of the world, so the topics and the exercises, the examples, may not be exactly suitable for your own class.

So these are reasons to go away from the coursebook, to adapt the coursebook and make it more suitable for the needs of your particular students and your particular teaching.