Chapter 8: Being Materialistic! Using Course Books and Other Materials 119
Adapting Your Course Book
Apart from the fact that most teachers like to put their own stamp on a
lesson, other reasons may make it necessary for you to tinker with the mate-
rial the course book presents. One is that course books adhere quite closely
to a particular level, so if you have some outstanding students and other
extremely weak ones and no hope of moving them up or down, you need to
adapt to all your students. Similarly, if all your students are at an intermedi-
ate level but a couple are teenagers, a few are housewives, there’s a middle-
aged businessman and a great-grandfather you need to tailor your lessons to
meet everyone’s interests – or try to!Catering to a class of mixed ability
If one student is much better than the rest of the class, she may get bored
with lessons using material she already knows. You need to think of ways to
extend the exercises in the book to provide a greater challenge.For the more advanced students, try these options:✓ Provide a learners’ dictionary so that students can look up words in the
course book and prepare to explain them to the rest of the class. This is
an alternative to pre-teaching (teaching the meaning of new vocabulary
just before students encounter it in the lesson materials) vocabulary
yourself.
✓ While other students are still reading, set an extra activity for the
quicker students:
- Have them transform all the verbs into a different tense.
- Have them retell the story without using particular ‘taboo’ words.
These exercises stretch their grammar and vocabulary respectively.
For weaker students, you can:✓ Supplement the book by offering extra information. Plan additional pre-
sentations on points that the students find difficult and prepare glossa-
ries of the vocabulary in a particular lesson for easy reference.
✓ Make the activities easier than the ones in the book. For example, where
the book has a fill-in-the-gap exercise, you can give the students a mul-
tiple choice option.
✓ Make greater use of the images as these are less threatening to the stu-
dent than words. Ask easier questions about what is in a picture and get
students to label it.
✓ Split up a unit to make the content more manageable and less stressful.