Adapting your course book

Many language departments continue to work with text books, often accompanied by ancillary digital resources. From what I understand, few teachers follow books religiously. Instead, they opt to adapt them to the needs of classes and their own preferences. But is there a proper rationale for how to adapt text books to best effect? In this blog, I'm dipping again into the Nation and Macalister book called Language Curriculum Design (2010). Chapter 11 looks specifically at this issue of adapting course books. I'll concisely summarise a number of the key points they make, adding my own comments from my own experience.



When teachers depend heavily on the text book

There may be good reasons for sticking quite closely to the course book. Nation and Macalister mention the following points:

1. The school of Ministry of Education requires the book to be followed closely. Reasons may be to standardise the quantity and quality of education or a lack of trust in teacher skill.
2. Teachers may be inexperienced or untrained, so the book offers some security and teachers may not have the skill to adapt the book.
3. The teacher may believe in the high quality of the course book.
4. Learners may want to cover every part of the book.

(I would add that inertia can play a role in the case of departments who are reluctant to change or where the current approach may be yielding good results. In other departments, the lack of sharing of home-made resources may lead to a greater dependence on the text book. My own interactions with teachers suggest Point (3) is true - while there are many gripes about text books, some seem very happy with their books and consider they only need some light adaptation or selective use.)

Nation and Macalister point out that even when teachers follow a book closely, they may vary in the way they present and practise material, as well as how they monitor and assess achievement. Ways to vary the presentation of text book material include varying the speed of recordings, increasing the number of repetitions of audio or video material and adapting exercises, including some as homework.

(I would add that where there are existing unit tests, these can either be omitted or adapted to suit the needs of the class. For example, audio texts can be read aloud, exercises shortened or extended. In particular, time-consuming oral assessments can be omitted.

Adapting a course book

Other teachers prefer to adapt their course book in major ways. Some reasons for doing this, according to Nation and Macalister, include:

1. The book does not include tasks teachers have used successfully before.
2. The book does fit with the time available for the course.
3. The book contains material unsuitable for the age or proficiency of the class.
4. The book lacks the language items, skills, ideas or strategies the students need.
5. The book does not apply principles the teacher believes in.
6. The book does not allow for any student input into the course.

(I would add that in the UK, and in schools following an English exam board syllabus such as GCSE,  the book may not match sufficiently well with the specific requirements of the high stakes exam for which students are preparing. Conversely, some books may follow the syllabus so slavishly that they lack the interest and variety some teachers would like to see. For example, they may lack communicative tasks, enough practice examples, or interesting aural and written texts. A common criticism I read is that the subject content is not sufficiently cognitively challenging or of intrinsic interest. Other criticisms would be the apparent lack of a principled approach to spacing, retrieval and comprehensible input, i.e. including texts beyond the comprehension level of students.)

Where the above points 1 to 6 make a book undesirable for teachers they have a choice: abandon it, or adapt it substantially. Many of you will be in this position, as was I, and choose to adapt the course book, partly because that book contains useful audio material which is hard to source elsewhere. How can you adapt the book? Nation and Macalister suggest the following ways:

1. Add or omit content. (This is a common approach whereby you skip over the bits you don't like or add your own materials, e.g. more grammar practice examples, sentence builders or texts.)
2. Change the sequencing of the content. (You may choose to do this for all sorts of reasons. For example, if you use a text of your own containing new grammatical structures, you may use material from further ahead in the book. Or you may just feel unsatisfied with the way grammar is selected and graded and introduce more complex structures sooner.)
3. Change the format. You might just resequence a particular unit, starting with an activity occurring a little later in the unit. (Keep in mind that good books sequence their content carefully, but often in a predictable sequence, so one reason for resequencing would be to simply provide some variation. This might even depend on the mood of the class that day (and yours!).
4. Change the presentation. Use different techniques for teaching the content to those suggested in the book or Teacher's Book. (I did this frequently, particularly when working with texts. Usually, lack of space means that texts are exploited superficially, so you need to develop a range of tasks to enable a text to be understood and processed.)
5. Add or omit monitoring. For example, you can get students to test each other to check progress.
6. Add or omit assessment. You can add extra quizzes or tests as you go along, to supplement the published end of unit test.

Nation and Macalister go on to suggest that one significant way to adapt a book is by adding a programme of reading, or supplying extra listening material. This would be to respect three core principles the authors describe earlier in their book. These are:

• Comprehensible input. There needs to be substantial amounts of interesting written and spoken input.
• Fluency. The course should provide opportunities to increase fluency by using language they already know repeatedly.
• Time on task. As much time as possible needs to be spent on focusing on language use (as opposed to descriptions of the language - "talking about the language").

In conclusion, I would say this. You may already successfully adapt your course book in a kind of instinctive fashion, without necessarily thinking through your rationale. You just have a gut feeling that an exercise will work, a text is dull or a task too hard. Some teachers, often less experienced ones or trainees, may need more help refining the skill of evaluating and adapting course book. For me, the key thing is this: does the book apply sensible, research-informed principles of language teaching, such as the primacy of interesting comprehensible input, repetition, spacing, retrieval, interaction and practice? If so it may be a decent book which doesn't require too much adaptation. If not....