Teaching without a coursebook

Teaching without a coursebook
Whether you're starting with a new class or just changing direction a little the decision of how to structure a course without a coursebook can sometimes be difficult for a new or even experienced teacher.

• What's wrong with using a coursebook?
• A topic based syllabus
• Structuring the course
• Needs analysis
• Set short term objectives
• Remedial grammar
• Error correction
• Variety
• Conclusion

What's wrong with using a coursebook?
Well, in many cases, nothing! With the constant updating of text books to include new and relevant topics, ideas and methodology, teachers have a great set of resources at their fingertips. Students however may not see it that way. Perhaps they have had past experiences with a "bad" textbook, in other words, following a book which is not well chosen in terms of their age, interests and needs. Maybe they are lacking a little variety in their classes or perhaps you or they just want a break or a change from routine.

A topic based syllabus
What might sound like fun for the students can seem a bit daunting for the teacher. By taking away the course book we are taking away our safety net, our tried and tested syllabus written by someone who apparently knew what they were doing!

Using a topic-based syllabus as a framework, however, provides a natural stimulus for language learning in a realistic context. By starting with a topic of interest and then discussing or explaining an issue or opinion, students will find out what they want to say and whether they can say it or not. This then, provides further objectives, whether they be grammatical, lexical or pronunciation based, on which to build the course.
Structuring the course
What might at first sight seem like quite an unstructured course can in fact be deceptively well organised. Here are a five steps to follow to ensure that both students and teacher feel that the course is properly designed:
Needs analysis
The key to beginning a successful topic-based course is to clearly establish the students' interests and motivations. As part of your lesson get the students to talk about themselves and each other and find out what they enjoy, what they don't like, whether they know what's going on in the news at the moment and so on.

• Keep a note of what comes up as the list of potential topics can be long and every student will be different.
• Ultimately, those topics which will be successful are those which spark off an agreement or disagreement with someone else in the class as well as those the students seem well-informed about.
• The students will take over the conversation and lead it where they want it to go.

Whether or not you get a long list from students, you can always use course books "behind the scenes" to help you. Take a look at the contents page of a course book for topic ideas and suggest them to students or take one of the student's ideas and back it up with more material from the book. Students will never know their ideas originally came from a book!
Set short term objectives
The list resulting from the needs analysis may be long with a variety of topics and areas of interest. Rather than trying to include everything, plan to focus on three or four over a certain time frame, either a term or particular number of hours depending on the frequency of the classes. Decide with the students what their objectives for the coming course will be, for example: to develop their ability to discuss certain topics with more confidence, fluency and awareness of relevant language. Endeavour to ensure that topics cover several lessons to give an idea of continuation. Even better if you can find a link between topics so the students will have some thread to follow over the course.
Remedial grammar
While topics and current affairs tend to lend themselves to a great deal of discussion it is important that the students don't feel that grammar or language input has been abandoned altogether! Although they may not want to follow a structural syllabus per se, there will be structural errors which repeatedly occur both in needs analysis and during the course and these will form the underlying framework for language input.

• This of course requires teachers to be more flexible and reactive to problems which are arising. Again, course books can be used as a base and exercises selected according to the needs of the students. It is still okay for the teacher to say "We'll discuss this in detail next lesson!" if something comes up that wasn't prepared.

Error correction
When focusing mainly on conversation in class it is very tempting to encourage fluency at the expense of accuracy, especially at high levels.

• Discuss this issue with the students encouraging them to think about when they want to be corrected. Many are keen to be corrected on the spot, some prefer correction slots throughout the class or at the end.
• Trying several different approaches will allow both teacher and student to find which works best for them.
• Keeping a note of errors and giving them back to the students the following lesson to correct really makes them think back and pay attention to the mistakes they are making.

Variety
The wider the variety of sources and resources you and your students can find, the better. Let's take an example:

• Students have all agreed they are interested in cinema. As a starting point find out which films particularly they like and ask them to explain the story and why they like them.
• The Internet, magazines and newspapers can be used to research films and language of film reviews can be studied.
• Video or DVD can be used to watch all or some of the films and a variety of work can be done on this involving discussion, pronunciation, accents, role plays, descriptions, predictions, translations. Don't forget it is most important to grade the task not the text so authentic materials can be used with low level classes.
• Course book material can be used to add to this in terms of listening and reading material at any level.
• A variety of topics could follow on from this starting point of cinema. Fame and fortune, privacy, the media, entertainment, fashion are all possibilities that could be exploited. Indeed the topics contained in some of the films may even provide links to a wider variety of discussions and areas of interest.

Conclusion
Teaching without a coursebook won't please everyone all of the time and can create a lot of extra work, but in terms of your own teacher development and as a way of keeping your classes fresh and interesting for your students, I would definitely recommend giving it a try from time to time.

Making the Most of Your Coursebook

Making the Most of Your Coursebook

The dialogues and texts used in EFL coursebooks are generally there to develop listening and reading skills. But they also contain a lot of language that the students could usefully “notice”, and this potential is often under-exploited. After the initial use of the text for comprehension, how can you recycle the texts and use them to develop the students general linguistic competence?

If you want to take a published text and adapt it in some way, you obviously face the issue of copyright. However, some publishers now accept that teachers need to adapt materials in order to make them fully appropriate for their students and their own teaching style, and waive copyright for certain portions of the book. An example is Oxford University Press which, on its website, publishes the tapescripts of some of its courses (Headway and International Express for example) in Word format, so that teachers can copy and adapt them. For the series Business Focus, there is also an extremely useful and flexible cloze maker, which can be used either for the texts in the book, or for the teacher’s own texts.

I like to bring texts back three or four times during the course, so that the language they contain is constantly recycled. They can be given to the students as a homework exercise, used as fillers at the start of the lesson while you’re waiting for latecomers, or at the end if your planned activities finish five minutes early. The types of activity you can use include :

Scrambled texts. Give the students the paragraphs or sentences of the text in random order, and ask them to reconstitute the text. They may be cut up on separate strips of paper so that the students have to physically rearrange them on the desk (as ever, if you back them on card they’re more likely to be re-usable with a later class), or simply printed on a sheet of paper with a box next to each one where the students can write the appropriate number. If you use this activity you need to be sure that there are sufficient clues to make the activity possible. These will often be cohesive clues – linguistic connections between parts of the text, such as pronouns referring back to a previous noun How was your trip? / It was fine thanks or demonstratives and synonyms with the same reference function : At the moment there is the danger that the disease will reach pandemic proportions. This risk is made more serious by … And/Or there may be clues of coherence, logical relationships between parts of the text. The sequence How are you? / Fine, thanks. is coherent, whereas How are you? / At 10.15 is not. Be careful – these links do not always exist in a text and/or there may be more than one possible answer. When preparing the activity, check for this and if there’s a potential problem write the number of the problem sentence or paragraph next to it, so that students know where to put it in the text.

Scrambled sentences. Alternatively, the sentences can be given in order, but the words of each sentence jumbled. This is a useful activity if your students have problems with word order in English.

Gapped texts. There are various ways you can gap a text, from strict cloze technique (systematically taking out every fifth, seventh or ninth etc word) to more focused gapping – for example, removing all the prepositions or simply choosing the words which you feel it would be useful for the students to focus on. Obviously, this should not be a memory test : it must be possible to deduce the necessary word from the surrounding context, as in Can you pick ….. that piece of paper please? where the only possibility is up. Where there is more than one possibility, or simply to make the activity easier, the correct words can be given in jumbled order in a box at the top of the exercise, or the first letter of the word can be given: Can you g…………. me a hand with these boxes? The OUP cloze maker allows you all these options.

Use the correct form. This is also a variant of a gapped text. It’s most commonly used with verbs – the verb is taken out of the sentence and the infinitive given in brackets (or, this time to make it harder, in scrambled order before the exercise) : I …… (go) to Spain last August. It can also be used, however, for other word classes – for example for comparatives and superlatives Barcelona is the ………………… (beautiful) city I know. or to focus on prefixes and suffixes He was fired because his work was ………… (satisfaction)

Spot the Mistake. Again there are several variations of this activity. You can :
· Insert a certain number of mistakes into the text, for example : Did you have a good travel? As before, the mistakes can be focused (verb forms, prepositions, spelling etc) or mixed, focusing on the words you want the students to notice. It helps if you tell the students how many mistakes they have to find – one per line, or eight in the whole text, for instance.
· Give alternative words : Did you have a good trip/travel? / Barcelona is the most/more beautiful city I know. The students have to choose the correct alternative.
· Add an extra word into each line of the text : I went to Spain the last August or, alternatively, omit one word from each line : I have to go to office. Again, the words you choose to add or omit will reflect the problems which you know your students have, and which you want them to focus on. This type of personalisation is the reason why this type of exercise can best be designed by the teacher rather than the coursebook writer.

Rewrite the text. The students are given a version of the text almost but not quite like the original and have to rewrite it. For example, at beginner’s level they might have a version using full forms of the verb BE. They have to rewrite it putting the contractions back in wherever possible.

All of these activities have the advantage that the students can self-correct by looking back at the original text, which as I argued in Correcting Written Work : Encouraging "Noticing" often pushes them into a deeper form of cognitive processing than just having their work corrected. However, there are other variations which need a teacher’s confirmation. For example, if two three possibilities were given in Spot the Mistake, two of which were correct and one wrong : Did you have a good trip/travel/journey? The students would be able to find one of the correct alternatives in the original dialogue, but would need help for the second. The same would happen if there were more than one possible answer in a gapped passage : Can you ……… me a hand with these boxes? The original text might use give, but lend would be equally possible. Or if students at higher levels were given an informal version of a business letter they had already studied and had to convert it back to formal style. There might well be more than one acceptable alternative for each phrase.

But won’t the students get bored with working on the same text all the time? Not if the activities are varied, increase in level of difficulty each time, and the recycling is mixed in with other, newer work. In fact, very often they may not even remember having seen the text before. This is a sign that their processing of the text has not gone very deep – however often you’ve recycled it. One way to increase the “depth” of this processing is to ask them to create the exercise to be used with the text themselves. Once students are familiar with the exercise types that can be used, distribute a different previously studied text to each person. List a number of exercise types on the board, check that the students remember them, and ask them to choose one to apply to their text. For homework, they create the exercise and in the next lesson swap exercises and do the activity which another student has created.