5 Ways To Adapt Your EFL Coursebook

What are the best books for teaching English as a foreign language? What are the best books for English language learners? And for English teachers? How do we choose a coursebook for teaching English? Do we even need an EFL coursebook? 

So. Many. Questions.

As EFL teachers, EFL coursebooks are part and parcel of our jobs. A lot of TEFL teachers have a love-hate relationship with the EFL/ESL coursebook. We love to have one but we often don’t actually like using it. 

If we have them, we complain about them and don’t want to use them, but if we don’t have them we complain and wish we had their structure and resources at our disposal. 

Love them or hate them, course books are here to stay, so it’s a good idea to get to know the best way to get them to work for you.

The best books for teaching English as a second/foreign language

There are both good things and bad things about EFL coursebooks, which we’ve spoken about before.

To recap; The good thing about coursebooks is that they provide a structure to our lessons and give us an accurate way of assessing our learners’ levels. On the downside, coursebooks can be outdated or irrelevant. Following a coursebook to a T is a sure way to destroy any kind of motivation in your classroom.

The thing is, you may not have a choice about whether or not you want to use one. 

If your school rqeuires you to use a coursebook, you’re obliged to use the coursebook they prescribe – whether you think it’s a good one or not! 

How to choose an EFL coursebook

If you have a choice of coursebook, go for one which is:

• appropriate for your learners’ level,
• culturally appropriate for your teaching situation,
• attractive to you and your learners,
• rich with resources and extra materials, and
• readily available where you are. 

Regardless of which you coursebook you are going to use, there will be parts of it you love and parts of it you don’t love so much. Is there a way we can utilise the good parts of a coursebook while ignoring the bad bits?

Of course there is!

Here are 5 steps to adapt the coursebook to make the most of it:

Step 1: Look at what you’ve got

Look carefully at the pages you need to teach. Look at what comes before them and what comes after them. Be clear on the aims of your lesson. Think about:

•  what your students will already know,
• what problems they might have with the language, 
• what activities they enjoy doing, and 
• what skills they need to practise.

Step 2: Choose what to use

Now that you know what you want your students to do, think about how they will achieve this. 

Decide which parts of the course book pages you will use i.e. which exercises. It’s perfectly OK not to use everything in the course book. 

Maybe the reading is not appropriate (or interesting enough) for your class. Maybe the grammar exercises are too easy or difficult. Maybe they’ve recently covered that particular pronunciation point. 

Decide which exercises and activities are appropriate, which ones you will adapt, and which ones you will leave out completely.

Alternatively, let your students decide. 

Give the control of the content of the lessons to your students. Let them decide which parts of a unit they want to do and which parts they don’t. You should find that because they have the autonomy to choose what they are going to do in the lesson, they will be more invested in the activities.

Step 3: Decide on a sequence

Now you must just decide when you want to do what. How to get from start to finish. What’s the best way to accomplish your aims.

There is no need for you to start at Exercise 1A and finish at 6E. Jump around on the pages as much as you like, as long as the sequencing makes sense. 

Decide the timeframes for each activity, but this will depend on your class.

Step 4: Make the course book work for you

Once you have decided what you are going to do and when you are going to do it, you can think about how you can adapt the course book material to make it more dynamic. 

If an activity requires students to fill in a table, for example, why not turn this into a whole class activity on the board – a board race? 

If an activity asks students to ask their partner certain questions, why not let your students come up with the questions and then let them mingle? 

Think about different groupings you can incorporate into your lesson and different types of activities and how you can make the activities more reflective of real-life communication.

You might decide to replace a text. 

If a particular text is uninspiring, irrelevant or inappropriate, replace it. If you can find a relatively similar text better suited for your students, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t use it and construct your own activities to go with it.

You can supplement your coursebook.

Try to find other texts which fit the theme which you can add to your lessons, preferably authentic texts. Using audio or video clips can make even the most bland topic interesting.

Thankfully these days coursebooks often have online supplementary material. This could include videos, webquests or interactive activities. Make use of these and other resources available on the publisher’s website to make the coursebook come alive.

Above all, don’t forget to personalise the activities. 

It’s always important to relate a text back to the students. This makes the topic more relevant and the language more memorable.

For example, when giving instructions for activities. 

Coursebooks use generic prompts for their activities. There is no need to make your students read instructions in a coursebook when it can be much simpler for you to explain what needs to be done and demonstrate with a personal example. You are doing the same activity but taking your students’ heads out of the coursebooks, which they will appreciate.

Or a text about sports. 

If there is a reading on a specific sport or sportsperson, why not ask the learners to talk about a sportsperson from their country, or a sport they play. 

Step 5: Get teaching!

All that’s left for you to do is carry out your plan, execute your most amazing lesson plan and enjoy!

Coursebooks are a necessary part of any EFL classroom, no matter where or who you are teaching. While they definitely have their positives, there are negatives which need to be considered when deciding how to utilise a coursebook. Using these few tips will help you make the most out of your coursebook without throwing it out the window.