Coursebooks and materials - Best Use of the Coursebook


So how do we actually make best use of the course book? Well, just a couple of factors that you need to keep into consideration when using these types of material, use the course book to help you create a balanced lesson in terms of the range of skills that are being taught and the actual types of material within that the grammar or vocabulary. Secondly, don't use it all the time, particularly with things like activities, we can create our own materials and we can tailor those materials much more specifically to the actual class that we're teaching. As very often the actual creations in the book are very general, we can make our own materials much more specific. The third thing you need to be aware of is that you can't always rely 100% on the information that's presented in those books, both in terms of accuracy, though there are very often mistakes and, secondly, the way in which the information is presented may not be the best way for your students to understand it. So you may need to actually change the way that the books present the material to make it more understandable for your students themselves. Finally, it's very important that you actually match the material that's given in the book to your particular students? needs. Within any particular lesson they may have an equal focus on various types of skill and information but your students may need more work in one particular area than that book actually presents. So don't rely just on the information given in the book. Think about what your students need. What do I need to add to it? What should I take away and so on and so forth? So for different possible approaches to using the course books may be to omit, to replace, to supplement or to adapt. With omit basically what we mean is that we leave out selected parts of the material presented in the book, either a single part of a lesson or indeed a whole lesson or maybe even two or three lessons in a row. So we omit certain parts of the book. We can replace material within the book with what we think is more suitable material. We can supplement additional material into what's already given in the book. So in areas where we think our students need more help we can add additional material as appropriate and we can adapt. So sometimes we would perhaps like to use our own style of materials based on the information that's given in the course book rather than the course book materials themselves.


The subject of this unit was â€œEquipment and teaching aidsâ€ and I think it was a very useful unit. Teachers have to remember that there are so many different aids they can use to make the lesson more atractive and easier to understand. Many teachers forget about that or donâ€™t have the creativity, but itâ€™s not so difficult. In my opinion it is really important to use different kinds of materials and equipment, because every student is unique and some may learn better from a worksheet, while others will get more from a video.