With the topic of ‘Adaptation’ our discussion is reaching a point where I find myself becoming much more interested and engaged on a personal level. While thinking about frameworks for designing textbooks and the evaluation of textbooks seemed quite dry, telling each other stories about times when we had successfully adapted our coursebook to better suit our learners felt a lot more real and about our day-to-day work as teachers. This is especially the case regarding instances of adaptation that are not part of some elaborate, pre-conceived planning process but the ‘on-the-go’ adaptation that teachers do all the time in the classroom when they are ‘thinking on their feet’ (McDonough, 1993: 84) to address problems arising during the lesson. I can see that there is a demand for centrally published materials and that it might be just as well to learn some techniques to tap into this to advance our professional development. But I am not overly enthusiastic. Over the course of my studies I have come to realise that I think of learning as co-creation of knowledge between participants, so in an ideal world I am imagining teaching scenarios where my students and I work together to create materials of the moment.
Saying that I do see why it is useful and necessary to first evaluate what it is most of us are working with, i.e. some textbook or other form of published material. However far one wants to take the ‘adaptation’ process this seems to be a good starting point. As McDonough and Shaw put it: “How can we change something unless we are clear about what it is we are changing” (1993: 82).

Why

One main question that needs to be addressed is why teachers adapt course materials. When we exchanged stories with each other during our seminar, several reasons became apparent. In our group Adriana, for example, decided that a YouTube video of a performance of the poem from her textbook was a much better way to introduce her students to the poem than just her or the students reading it from the book. She thought this was more likely to arouse her students’ interest and that it would also help a dyslexic student in her class.
With her class of 15 Turkish students who were in Brighton for only four days, Jane found out about her students’ interests on the first day of the course and then only chose units from the coursebook that matched these interests most closely. In one lesson they talked about people’s style and appearance and Jane, rather than just working from the images in the book (especially since her students only had photocopies of these!), encouraged her students to think about how the style of people in Brighton compared to that of people back in Turkey. Towards the end of the lesson Jane decided to let her students take over to change the topic to ‘food’, as she realised that there were many concerns with students finding the food they were offered in their host families lacking in quantity and quality.
Alison currently faces a particularly tricky situation on a new course which brings together a group of adult students who she has known for a while and another of young Danish students who have just arrived in Brighton. On the first day of the course one of the Danish students broke into tears completely overwhelmed by the expectation of having to speak English all the time and also threatened by Alison’s/the textbook’s use of grammar meta-language. In order to boost her students’ confidence, Alison decided to lift the following day’s lesson off the page using the interactive whiteboard. By providing lots of extra examples of phrases and thereby teaching grammar implicitly she also avoided using meta-language. A list of other possible ‘whys’ that includes many of our own reasons can be found on page 86 of ‘Materials and Methods in ELT’ (McDonough & Shaw, 1993).
Interesting here is also McGrath’s study of Chinese teachers’ and students’ images for coursebooks (McGrath: 2006). In agreement with Thornbury (1991), McGrath believes that the study of metaphors can lead to important insights regarding attitudes towards coursebooks as “teachers’ images not only reflect their thinking about teaching and learning but also influence [author’s emphasis] their practice” (McGrath, 2006: 172). What seems most surprising but also enlightening is the range of metaphors from very positive to extremely negative – ‘lighthouse’ vs ‘straitjacket’ both found in the teachers’ sample or, even more extreme, ‘God’s messenger’ vs ‘a devil’ in the students’ sample – but also at times contradictory, e.g. “bee hive which has sweet honey and a lot of painful stings” (McGrath, 2006: 177). Studying metaphors of coursebooks therefore is another way of finding out why some teachers are happy to follow the coursebook while others feel compelled to make changes along the way.

McGrath, 2006: 174 – Table 1

McGrath, 2006: 176 – Table 2

Table 2 (continued)

How

Alongside the ‘why’ of adaptation, the ‘how’ deserves maybe even more attention. Here are some examples of what we came up with in our groups during the seminar:

Overall extra visual input figures quite highly, especially videos (YouTube), photos and other images mainly sourced on the internet. Making effective use of technology is also evidenced when teachers create extra tasks using software like Kahoot or Quizlet or when the IWB is used to divert focus away from the textbook.

It seems that in recent years attitudes have changed from seeing adaptation techniques (e.g. ‘Framework for Adaptation’ in McDonough & Shaw, 1993: 96) in quite neutral terms simply as part of the teacher’s job description to an understanding of them as ‘coping strategies’ that make published materials ‘bearable’ (Maley in Tomlinson, ed. 2011: ). Maybe that reflects a recognition of the key role teachers play in identifying and catering for the needs of their students and the resulting need for teachers to be granted more power and control over what they are teaching with. Some argue that it is necessary to change people’s mind-sets at a much deeper level with regards to the creation and use of teaching materials. Maley for example values Prabhu’s idea of introducing semi- and/or meta-materials (Maley in Tomlinson, 2011). The first refer to (still centrally produced) single activities, e.g. skills exercises or vocabulary work, with the teacher deciding order and pace of use, and ‘raw’ materials, e.g. spoken/visual/text input presented by the teacher with the procedure of what to do with this input emerging in the lesson. Meta-materials on the other hand are ‘empty pedagogical procedures’, such as dictation or role-play. The teacher has control over choosing the input that these procedures are being applied to. Maley extends Prabhu’s ideas by introducing the notion of flexi-materials, a sort of combination of semi- and meta-materials. Flexi-materials would give teachers “control over content, order, pace and procedure”. What Maley has in mind is best illustrated by the tables below taken from “Squaring the circle – reconciling materials as constraint with materials as empowerment” (in Tomlinson, 2011: 386/387).

Maley in Tomlinson, 2011: 386/387 – Tables 15.1 and 15.2

And that is more or less where I started at the beginning of this post: my current understanding of my role as a teacher as facilitator and of learning being at its most exciting when you let the process take over.

“[T]eachers may decide to dispense with pre-developed materials altogether. Instead, they set the scene for a process to take place. It is the process which will generate its own content and learning activities” (Maley in Tomlinson, 2011: 383)

References:

Maley, A. (2011) “Squaring the Circle – Reconciling Materials as Constraint with Materials as Empowerment” in Tomlinson, B. (Ed.) Materials Development in Language Teaching, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McDonough, J. and Shaw, C. (1993) Materials and Methods in Elt: A Teacher’s Guide, Oxford: Blackwell.
McGrath, I. (2006) “Teachers’ and Learners’ Images for Coursebooks”, ELT Journal, 60 (2) pp. 171-180.
Thornbury, S. (1991) “Metaphors We Work By: Efl and Its Metaphors”, ELT Journal, 45 (3) pp. 193-200.