COURSEBOOKS

Anca Lăptucă

Colegiul Naţional "Mihai Viteazul", Ploieşti

Coursebooks are great and no one can deny how helpful they have been to us especially during our first years of teaching.

We didn’t know much about methods and approaches when we first started so the coursebook did everything. However, after teaching for some time, we start making changes to the activities and make them more suitable for your specific context and you finally end up developing your own material from scratch.

Coursebooks didn’t use to be as abundant as they are now. The choices were very limited and you just had a couple of them to work on. A lot has changed in the world of material development and new books are being published rapidly and we always have a list of books to choose from no matter how specialist the area we are planning to work on is.

When it comes to coursebooks, we usually have to ask ourselves one of the following questions before the course begins:

If we are free to decide what coursebook to work on, what criteria should we be checking the books against, in order to make our final decision?

If we are forced to teach a specific coursebook and it doesn’t seem to the best option, how can we adapt things in it?

To address the first question, Jack C. Richards¹ mentions the following coursebook evaluation criteria to think about:

· Goals

· Syllabus

· Theoretical Framework

· Methodology

· Language Content

· Other Content

· Organisation

· Teacher/Learner Appeal

· Ancilliaries

· Price

There is no right or wrong (good or bad) answers to any questions regarding the above-mentioned criteria to keep in mind before deciding which coursebook to work on but the answers to any evaluation questions should be analysed based on the context we are planning to use that coursebook in. We usually ask ourselves a series of questions and, based on the context, we make our final decision. These are the questions we ask:

Commenting on these questions about three or four books and then taking a step backwards to have a clearer overview on what is going to be the backbone of your course, will give us more decision-making power than simply flipping through pages not knowing what to look for!

This is not always the case and sometimes we have to teach a coursebook which doesn’t seem to contain what we actually need! Common problems might be:

· Everything is old and boring and our students are not interested into the topics.

· The book focuses on grammar presentation and our students know the rules well. We need more speaking practice in the book.

· The activities don’t resemble real life.

· The recordings are awful (quality and/or content)!

· The book is exam-oriented and makes our students nervous all the time! etc.

Fortunately, the online world has brought us several solutions to all of these problems and we can easily find alternatives to the lessons in the coursebooks.

Costas Gabrielatos addressed all these issues in one of his articles² published in the IATEFL Teacher Trainers and Educators SIG Newsletter in 2004. He believes coursebook/lesson adaptation means we feel we have to:

· omit

· re-order

· replace

· change

· combine

· add

· to make the lesson a more acceptable component to our teaching.

To sum up, coursebook adaptation is sometimes inevitable but this does not, by any means, mean the coursebook authors have not spent enough time on developing the course; it just means ‘it is not fair to judge apples and oranges by the same criteria!’

Richards, J.C. (2001) ‘Curriculum Development in Language Teaching’, Cambridge University Press

Gabrielatos, C. (2004), 'The coursebook as a flexible tool.' IATEFL Teacher Trainers and Educators SIG Newsletter, 28-31