Ideas for Using and Adapting your Coursebook

During your CELTA course, you will be given teaching practice points from a coursebook. You tutors will certainly help you with guidelines and suggestions on how to adapt and use it in class.

Still, you might want to go the extra mile and impress them by choosing some alternative – and, hopefully, more creative ideas to help you in your lessons.

Here is a the video of a recent webinar I did for a university and some points and direct links within the video itself – you can also watch and follow the transcript if you watch this on You Tube

The video discusses adapting and designing materials for language learning, emphasizing the importance of evaluating materials to identify their strengths and weaknesses.

Here’s a summary of the key points covered:

Teacher’s View of Coursebooks: Teachers have different perspectives on coursebooks, viewing them as helpful tools, pillars of wisdom, or even burdens [03:38].
Positive and Negative Impacts of Materials: Materials can enrich learning experiences and offer learner training, but they can also oversimplify content or bore learners [05:24].
Evaluating Materials: Teachers should critically assess materials for appeal, credibility, educational philosophy, and motivational value [13:47].
Creating Checklists: Teachers can create their own checklists for evaluating materials, such as the “FRIEND” acronym, which includes fun, reality, ideology, education, and needs [15:30].
Adapting Materials: Adapting coursebooks is often necessary due to clutter, lack of engagement, or cultural issues [23:34]. Adaptations can involve shortening, expanding, or modifying activities [25:46].
Communicative Language Teaching: Principles for making materials more communicative include information gaps, information transfer, and real-world relevance [28:20].
Task-Based Learning: The video promotes task-based learning, where learners produce language first before analyzing it [35:26].
Engaging Activities: The presenter shared ideas for engaging activities, such as using images to guess stories, creating funny questions, and using technology for collaborative writing [37:07].
Making Exercises Fun: The video suggests turning boring exercises into games or competitions to increase learner engagement [34:26].
Encouraging Creativity: The presenter encourages teachers to foster creative and critical thinking in learners through silly and imaginative tasks [48:35].