In Brian Tomlinson’s Materials Development in Language Teaching, Malay (2011) explains that because coursebooks have to appeal to the largest possible number of students, teachers will need to adapt them for a specific learning context and to suit the needs of their learners. McGrath (2013) makes the same point that because coursebooks ‘are written for everyone they are written for no one’. Malay (2011) lists the number of ways teachers adapt:

• Omission
• Addition
• Reduction
• Extension
• Rewriting/modification
• Replacement
• Reordering
• Branching

More simply, McGrath (2013) observes that whenever teachers omit something, add something or change something, they are adapting.

Why do teachers adapt coursebooks?

As well as making materials suitable for a specific learning context, adaption helps to offset weaknesses in the material such as linguistic errors, out-or-datedness and a lack of authenticity. Anyone who’s used Total English will know its riddled with mistakes and dubious grammar explanations, making it one of the least popular coursebooks out there.

Many of the reasons McGrath (2013) cites for adapting coursebooks correspond to the principles underpinning the creation and evaluation of materials that we looked at in the preceding two seminars.

The principles McGrath (2013) sees as most often referred to are as follows:

Materials need to:

Be perceived as relevant by learners (localisation)

Be up-to-date (modernisation)

Cater for differences in learning styles (individualisation)

Encourage learners to speak/write about themselves and their own experiences (personalisation)

Engage the whole person (humanising)

Be appropriate to learners’ level/ be appropriately challenging (simplification/ complexification/differentiation)

Be varied (variety)

Modernisation refers to out-of-date language that does ‘not reflect current usage…or illustrations, facts, and topics that seem inaccurate or inappropriate because they are old-fashioned’. Below is an example from New Cutting Edge to illustrate this point. I can remember the topic (the Olsen twins) feeling out-of-date and irrelevant when I was using the book seven years ago. I think a real problem for publishers and indeed language schools, who spend a lot of money buying coursebooks, is that coursebooks can age pretty quickly.

Individualisation means trying to cater for different learning styles and can be achieved by making sure activities are not always carried out in the same way.

Personalisation encourages learners to engage with the material on a personal level. It ‘enables students to draw on their own experiences in order to express ideas in the target language’.

According to Tomlinson, materials adapted to be more humanising engage the learner on all levels such as ‘intellectually, aesthetically and emotionally’ and connect with the learners’ lives in some way.

When do teachers adapt coursebooks?

McGrath (2013) identifies the two different times when teachers decide to adapt as:

• Proactive adaption: Occurring before the lesson, during the planning stage, after evaluating the coursebook.
• Reactive adaption: Occurring during the lesson, in response to what is happening in the room.

He regards experienced teachers as being better at reactive adaption, however, he also points out that experience does not always result in ‘responsive, creative teaching’.

What do teachers adapt?

Anything! For example:

• Language
• Process
• Content
• Level

McGrath (2013) describes supplementation as an attempt to ‘bridge the gap’ between a coursebook/ exams/ syllabus and students’ needs. Taking into consideration learner motivation, supplementation is also necessary to bridge ‘an affective gap’.  Supplementation can take a variety of forms such as self-developed materials, warmers, additional visuals, and listening, additional skills practice, and consolidation activities.

Malay (2011) adds that while coursebooks will always be constraining in some way, there are many alternatives to having to rely on them such as:

• Abandoning the coursebook all together and implementing a skills-based syllabus using a published skills series.
• The resource option: where teachers, especially those working in well-resourced private language schools, choose all the materials.
• The process option: where a process, for example; project work, drama, extensive reading, creative writing or community language learning (CLL), generates content and learning.
• Developing a set of texts of varying difficulty or length and then developing a set of varied tasks to suit different levels to use alongside the text. The teacher can select the text and tasks to suits the context.
• Flexi-materials: where teachers are given a set of ‘raw texts’ and generalizable pedagogical procedures and then decide how to combine them.
• Content-based learning and content and language integrated learning (CLIL), where English is taught alongside another subject.

He also points out some of the benefits of the internet for teachers for instance:

• Teaching sites such as Onestopenglish and Dave’s ESL café, not to mention a vast number the blogs containing lesson plans.
• Access to an infinite source of (authentic) ‘raw texts’
• Reference sources such as dictionaries and corpora
• Emailing and social networking sites

Malay (2011) sees that general computer literacy training, such as practising ‘the non-linear reading skills needed to process electronic texts on screen’, would have ‘language learning payoffs’. This seems to be a crucial point from studying the module, which is the need to integrate technology and language learning.

Developing original materials

Block (cited by McGrath) see the creation of original material as an aspect of reflective practice which McGrath (2013) sees as a defining characteristic of teacher professionalism.

The three reasons Block gives for creating your own materials are as follows:

• Contextualisation: Teacher-created materials will be more ‘relevant and interesting’ than coursebook materials which are made for the global market.
• Timeliness: Teacher-prepared material can include current news stories and topics.
• The personal touch: He believes the extra effort will be appreciated by learners.

Jolly and Bolitho (2011) stress that after creating our own materials, we must evaluate them to decide if we can use them again unchanged or if we need to modify them in some way.

For me, the most important reasons for adapting are to make lessons interesting and to motivate and engage students.

In Materials Development for TESOL, Mishan and Timmis (2015) ask if it is right to adapt materials according to the teacher’s own preference. I would say it is if it means teachers will be more confident in delivering the lesson, but only if they are also able to take the learners needs and interests into consideration.

Bibliography:

Jolly, D., R, Bolitho (2011) A framework for materials writing. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed) Materials Development in Language Teaching. (2^nd ed) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Malay, A. (2011) Squaring the circle- reconciling materials as constraint with materials as empowerment. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed) Materials Development in Language Teaching. (2^nd ed) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McGrath, I. (2013) Teaching Materials and the Roles of EFL/ ESL Teachers: Practice and Theory. London: Bloomsbury.

Mishan, F., I. Timmis (2015) Materials Development for TESOL: Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.