Challenging the use of coursebooks in the classroom

“Despite the current rich array of English language teaching materials commercially available, many teachers continue to produce their own materials for classroom use” (Howard and Major, 2005, p. 101).

Why is it that sometimes teachers leave aside coursebooks to work with the materials they design?

From waddleeahchaa.com/teaching-supplies

According to Howard and Major (2005) designing your own materials has advantages and disadvantages. Our purpose is to share the advantages that may help you to rely on the use of teacher-produced materials:

·Contextualization: designing or adapting materials according to the specific group of learners and cultural or educational context of the particular learning environment. Therefore, teachers can “overcome the lack of “fit” of the coursebook.” (Howard et al., 2005).

·Individual needs: refers to the heterogeneity inherent in the classroom. The teacher designs materials taking into account the learners’ first languages and cultures, their learning needs and their experiences.

·Timeliness: when teachers produce materials they can choose current events or topics so as to be relevant to the students.

·Personalization: following Block’s idea (1991), “home-made” materials not only add a personal touch to teaching but also are appreciated by students.

In our opinion, the last one is particularly important because in designing his or her own materials the teacher has a more active role since he/she “avoids ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach of most commercial materials” (Howard, et al., 2005) and contemplates individualities.

In his talk “How to escape Education’s death valley” (shown below), the British educator Ken Robinson (2013) describes three principles that are contradicted by the current culture of education:  human beings are naturally different and diverse; children are curious and teaching is a creative profession.

 We find that Teaching is a creative profession principle is closely related to the fact that when teachers design their own materials there is a process of personalization carried out. Depending on leaners needs, diversity and experiences the teacher can make more informed decisions using imagination and creativity to foster motivation and learning.

Robinson (2013) says that teaching is a creative profession and one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity. He concludes, “Education is not a mechanistic system but a human system”. In many instances, the use of the coursebook has this effect of mechanization; the students are seen as machines that have to work following a routine and not as individuals that have specific needs, differences and particularities. We believe this is vitally important for teachers not to forget.

 Hope you enjoy this interesting video!