How to Make the Most of Your TEFL Course Book

Teaching from a course book can get a bit stale if you don’t utilise it and inject some fun.  Some teachers avoid using their course book like the plague, whilst others confess to relying on it too much.  Balance is the key.  Students can also tend to groan when asked to open their course books as this usually signals a ‘boring’ activity.  What’s more students (and teachers) often don’t know what extra resources are in the book to aid learning.  

Here are some (hopefully) useful tips to making the most of your course book:

• On the first lesson do a course book quiz If your students are using the course book for the first time.  Your quiz could include ‘what page is the list of irregular verbs?/What page is the vocabulary list on?’.  Doing this helps students to become familiar with the layout and make use of the extra resources.
• Don’t feel that you have to do everything in the book Pick and choose what will work with your students and what will benefit them.  Remember the activities you choose should also fit in with your learning aims.
• Vary it up a bit Try to intermix activities from the book with non book activities.  This way, students aren’t spending large chunks of time solely on the book which they may deem as boring.
• Make activities from the book into communicative activities Get the students to: talk about pictures, get one student to open their book and describe a picture/activity to their partner etc.  There are many different ways to make a reading activity more fun.  With higher levels, you can assign paragraphs to different students, ask them to read and remember as much as possible.  Then they have to summarise the paragraph to their group members!  You could also get one student to read a paragraph to their partner, who must write down what they say.  They can then check for spelling errors etc and then change roles for the next paragraph.
• Use the transcripts in the back of the book If you want to have students practice a pronunciation area once you have done a listening exercise from the book, you can use the transcript (which is usually given at the back of the book).  Don’t forget to elicit and model the sounds on the board, and then drill the students first!  This is a great controlled practice exercise and students love to practice what they have just heard.  It also helps to solidify their understanding of what they have just heard.

• Use the communication activities in the back of the book These activities are a great resource that get students talking with zero preparation required from the teacher.  Just remember to read through to pre-teach vocabulary and think about how to give instructions clearly!
• Use the grammar summary Not sure how to teach a grammar point or need inspiration for making a worksheet for your students to practice a language point?  This section will help you no end!  What’s more it’s always good to refer students to the grammar summary when they need to cement their knowledge or revise for a test.
• If you want to make students work together Consider photocopying activities from the book.  You could also cut up reading activities for them to reassemble, get them to summarise the text together etc.
• Build interest Before students read a text from the book, take some of the sentences from it and scramble them.  You could also rewrite the text and put some mistakes in – the students have to find the mistakes and refer to the original in the book to check their findings.

There are many ways to exploit your text book - a sprinkle of creativity will work wonders in increasing both your and your students enjoyment of what could otherwise be a very dry lesson. 

What do you do to spice up your coursebook?

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