How to use an English textbook

In this video, I talk about how to use a textbook in your English classes. If you're a new teacher and you're not going to use a textboo or a "good" textbook, I feel sorry for you. Teaching's not easy, let me tell you.

  

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Hello, my name is Steven Starry from MadridTeacher.com and I’m going to talk about How to Use an English Textbook in your classes.

To Use or Not to Use

First, for a first-year teacher, and I’m not talking about conversation classes here, the question isn’t whether “To Use or Not to Use” a textbook, because it’s perfectly clear to me that you will have to use one if you teach a group. Why? Because, despite learning how to prep your own lesson plans on your TEFL course, I don’t think you will know enough or work fast enough yet to be able to prep all your own classes yourself. Besides, your Director of Studies will probably expect you to follow a textbook that the school will have already given the students. At least some of the students will probably want to work with it too. And in the case of children, their mamas and the Ministry of Education will want you to work with it as well. In any case, it’s in your best interests to use a textbook because with it you will actually be able to teach your students something.

A Problematic Level

Now, I want to talk about how to use an Elementary textbook, because though all levels of students have some sort of problem or other, the usage of textbooks with elementary students is particularly problematic. While you can put a lot of advanced level students together and not notice the differences in abilities between the students in a big way, the main problem with elementary level students is that little differences are very noticeable. Now, your school may place absolute beginners in with your group of “false beginners” and there may be 90 or 100 hours of studying or more of difference between the students in the group. There may even be a student or two who are actually pre-intermediate students who have forgotten a lot of English because they’ve been out of touch lately. And though the students might all start out at the same place on paper, you’ll notice that some students will pick up on your lessons much more quickly than others. And at the same time, others will feel that they don’t understand a thing that you’re teaching them. And the farther you go along, the worse that will get. The main problem is that absolute beginners can’t be in a group with other more advanced elementary students and your elementary textbook will hit them like a Mack truck.

Extremes

Ok. So these are the two extremes that you’re faced with with elementary students. Hopefully, your DOS will solve this problem before it even gets a chance to make your day. If not, the solution is to teach the textbook slowly using a lot more supplementary resource materials practicing each and every language point in many different ways. Now, these textbooks will come with a lot of communicative activities anyway.

Supplementary Materials

The teachers’ book in New English File elementary, for example, has plenty of activities with the instructions of how to use them. It also comes with supplementary grammar activities that you can use with your slower groups. Use them before the communicative activities to load your students up with the correct grammar before you set them off.

Teach and Review

Never overestimate your students’ real knowledge of a particular grammar point. They may be able to quote a grammar presentation on the present simple, but that’s a far cry from actually being able to use it in practice. As a teacher, your job will be to very patiently and repetitively teach and practice each and every grammar point again and again in different ways and on successive days until you see them start to sink in. And then you will have to keep coming back to them from time to time as a refresher.

Using the Workbook

For absolute beginners, the workbook will be a handy resource. You can assign the worksheets for homework, but unless you’ve got some heavy-duty institutional authority behind you, you’ll probably find that the students won’t do them. So, you’ll have to just do them in class, unless they rebel against them. Don’t just limit yourself to doing them and checking them in class. Try to use them in other ways to make them more interesting to the students. For example, if a particular worksheet comes with an activity practicing “he’s,” “she’s,” “his,” and “her,” why not take the opportunity to quickly drill this with the students’ own names in the class by first giving them an example and then eliciting the other sentences from the students: “he’s Roberto,” “she’s Maria,” etc.

Drilling Practice

Students at this level always need drilling practice with the subject pronouns. The same goes with the possessive adjectives. It’s your job as a teacher to dream up a drill or a game for each language point before you correct your worksheets in the class. Try to get the students to do these in pairs after you do a couple as examples. Also, don’t forget to review the vocabulary in pairs in different ways using the grammar they’ve learnt. For example, “What’s this?” “It’s a magazine.”

Read the Instructions in the Teachers’ Book

Don’t forget to read the instructions in your teachers’ book. A good textbook like NEF elementary will come with good warmers or optional lead-in activities and other games for you to use with each unit. This particular book comes with 8 or 10 very good song activities, for example: “The Best” by Tina Turner, “Pretty Woman” by Roy Orbison, “La Isla Bonita” by Madonna and “Your Song” by Elton John. If your school has a DVD player that you can use in your classes and you’re using this book, try to talk them into getting these videos. These songs work with all elementary level students no matter which textbook they’re using and they’re incredibly motivational. Of course, you’re not limited to using only the songs in one particular textbook, “Singing in the Rain” is great for the present continuous, for example, but be very careful using songs as a very difficult song will blow the students’ motivation away. (Be extremely careful with all requests. These are especially dangerous.)

Other Materials

And, by the way, NEF elementary comes with a video practicing functional / situational language, or English for restaurants, hotels, telephone calls, etc. Apart from the supplementary activities that come with the book, there are a million other resource books available. Ask your DOS for some supplementary resources if your textbook is moving too fast for the group. The ideal thing would be to use the old English file book as a supplementary source because, except for their using the same songs and the similarity of a few other activities, everything else is pretty complementary.

Don’t Do Everything

Lastly, let me say that you should make it a practice not to use every single thing in every unit. For instance, I skip every pronunciation activity in every textbook I use. I prefer to do these on the fly. Other teachers actually like to do them because they say they’re kind of fun for the students.

Good vs. Bad Textbooks

Apart from having content which is interesting for the students, good textbooks like English File and New English File come with clearly defined modules which are all intended to be taught in one session, though you can often do them in two if you use supplementary materials heavily. This is great because with some groups you might not want to be leaving half of the lesson for the next day because you’ll know that some of them will always be either late or absent altogether. Some textbooks come with elaborate lessons which take 4 or 5 class sessions to get through, meaning that by the time you get to the finale (perhaps a task-based lesson), most of your students will have missed at least one critical language lesson, making it all the more difficult to satisfactorily get through that big climactic activity.

Thank you for watching. I’m Steven Starry from MadridTeacher.com.