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You may be forced to use a course book which is for different students, in
terms of age and background, from the ones you are teaching.
The students may not like the book and be reluctant to use it. Perhaps a
student who considers himself to be “intermediate” ‘doesn’t want to use
a book labelled “elementary”. This may seem a trivial reason but to the
student it may be important.
So, the course book is an invaluable resource, but it may need adapting
to meet the class needs. These needs will vary according to the age,
language background, culture and ability of the students. Every class is
different, and the success of a course book depends to a large extent on
how el it is used by the teacher.
How can you make the best use of a course book?
There are many decisions you can make and actions you can take to make
the best use of a course book:
If possible, don’t use a course book immediately for the whole lesson.
Spend time in the first few lessons getting to know about the students
and their needs.
When planning your lessons, think about which parts of the course book
could be omitted, which could be used, and which need supplementing
with activities and materials from other sources.
You may want to do the activities in a different order from in the book.
However, this can be dangerous. When omitting, supplementing or
changing the order of activities make sure that this does not cause
problems that one activity doesn’t depend on doing another one first.
Skills books
Skills books, as their name suggests, focus primarily on the language
skills rather than specific areas of language. Many publishers produce a
series of skills books (one on reading, one on listening, one on speaking
and one on writing) at two or more levels. The listening and speaking
books are often accompanied by cassettes, and tape scripts are usually
included in the back of the student’s book. The teacher’s books that go
with the skills books often include lesson aims, guidelines as to how to
use the material and activities, and a key.
Authentic materials
What are authentic materials?
Anything a native speaker of English would hear or read, or use can be
described as authentic: Theatre programmers, newspapers, magazines,
poems, songs, brochures, information leaflets, menus, news broadcasts,
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