10 uses of Teacher's Books in the English classroom

Having written, adapted or edited countless Teacher's Books in my ELT career, I've often wondered just how much teachers (and, indirectly, students) appreciate the work that goes into developing these components and whether they really make full use of all the services they have to offer.

Here is a list of just 10 key uses of teacher's books, off the top of my head:

1. Answer keys

When I started out teaching, I didn't use a Teacher's Book. (Firstly, I didn't know or believe that I was supposed to. Secondly, penniless young teacher that I was, I economised by not buying any expensive components - just the essentials: a Student's Book and a Workbook for each course I taught.) When it came to checking correct answers at the end of an activity, I therefore always faced a challenge. At lower levels (Beginner, Elementary), I bravely improvised my own answers at the same time students were offering theirs. Which is all well and good if there is only one obvious correct answer. At higher levels, I basically had to do the exercises myself while the students were doing them - to produce an answer key for myself. 
Answer keys in Teacher's Book are enormous time-savers. And since they have passed through multiple hands during their development, they likely cover all, or at least most, of the possibilities - as well as advice for the more problematic items.

2. Audio script

Yes, a listening task is not really a listening task if you give students the text to read. And which skill do they find more challenging? Occasionally, you may want to exploit printouts of audio scripts for their language - but normally, you would prefer your students to really listen to complete their assignments. But this doesn't mean you'll also have to catch the specific details yourself - while you're also busy operating the equipment, monitoring the students' progress, providing help where necessary and watching the timing... not easy, even for a fluent speaker. 
However, if you give yourself a bit of an advantage by allowing you to read the text that your students are listening to, you'll be able to read ahead and better anticipate any issues that need extra scaffolding, and you'll also be more likely to catch the more problematic phrases (like homonyms, proper nouns, words with unexpected pronunciation - English has many of those, doesn't it?) - which means you'll be able to feel superior that you know even those bits that your students couldn't quite catch...
You'll also be able to use the text of the audio script itself for creating your own tasks (deleting words to make gap fills, jumbling paragraphs for ordering, or just using the text to provide grammar or vocabulary models) by simply photocopying them out of the Teacher's Book. 

3. Background information

Let's face it, our students and we are usually from two different generations. Which means our interests and our knowledge may not fully be in sync. This is OK. There are some things they know a lot more about - as there are things that you know more about, like English itself. But have you ever been in a situation where your students asked you a question about something in the coursebook that you felt you ought to know the answer to but didn't? Or ran into a text on culture, which mentioned something you never heard of? Or taught a CLIL lesson and - being an English teacher - you had only vague recollections of what you were taught in Science or Art class? 
We're not expected to know everything, of course. But to feel we are in control, it's good to be reassured that when unexpected things come up, as they inevitably do in our classes, we know where to turn. And what would be a better place for providing that background information than right next to the teaching notes for the exercise where they are likely to come up?

4. Lesson planning

Many teachers probably spend more time planning their lessons than delivering them. Teaching is a complex endeavour. You don't just have to devise a coherent, logical and varied chain of activities for each class - but you have to anticipate difficulties and plan solutions for them, and you have to justify (to yourself, to other stakeholders, and so on) why you are doing what you're doing. 
This is just another thing Teacher's Books usually take care of for us. The lesson objectives, the timing for each class and each activity, the interconnected activity sequences - they are all worked out for us. All we have to do is prepare ourselves, think things through and maybe rehearse before we stand in front of a class, delivering the lesson.

5. Methodology overview

And since we're on the subject of justifying our aims and methods, wouldn't it be reassuring to find out that the practices we follow routinely or instinctively in class work because there IS an underlying theoretical foundation below them? Does a typical teacher have the time and energy to catch up on the academic literature to find such theories and relate it to their teaching practices? Not usually - they're too busy teaching (and doing the paperwork that goes with teaching... but that's beside the point). 
Which is why Teacher's Books begin with a theoretical introduction - outlining the philosophy and its practical applications for the course. To help us, teachers, understand why we're following one methodology rather than another to achieve our objectives. 

6. Optional activities

Teaching the same material over and over again can get quite tedious after a while. In order to keep the lessons well-planned but also fresh for ourselves, we need some pre-planned variety. (Spontaneity is good, but have you ever done a fun activity to replace, say, a boring grammar drill, then realised you actually needed the output of that boring drill later on - and so you had to squeeze that in anyway, toppling over your whole carefully constructed lesson plan?) And not just that, each of our classes is different - consisting of different individuals, with diverging interests and skill sets. 
So, we occasionally need optional activities that cover the same ground, linguisticially speaking, but do it differently. Yes, we can devise our own, and yes, we can find supplementary activites from a range of printed and online sources - but can we really be sure the replacement will do exactly what's needed in the lesson sequence? Well, if the optional activity comes from the Teacher's Book for our course, it was written to fit exactly - so there's the well-planned variety for you that you needed.

7. Mixed-ability solutions

Have you ever taught a class that was NOT mixed-ability? In my opinion, there's no such thing! So when you are faced with a whole group of learners at mixed levels and with mixed abilities, who do you deliver your classes to? The "average student"? The "typical B1 learner"? Both may exist as an ideal - a figment of our professional imagination, but I'm not convinced you always have a single person in your classrooms that fit either of those descriptions completely. In other words, when you are teaching at an average level, you aren't actually teaching any single person with maximum efficiency. Weaker learners or lower-level learners (not the same thing!) need more support than the average and need to slow down from time to time - while stronger learners or higher-level learners (again, not the same thing!) need more challenges to keep stretching their limits, as that's the way we all learn. 
Which means in a mixed-ability class (that is, as we established, in ALL classes) you'll need to prepare a lesson for your "average/typical" learners + extra support and extra activities for the lower half of your group + extra challenges and extra activities for the higher half of your group = three entire lessons for each lesson delivered! (I'm exaggerating the point here, before you're tempted to interrupt me here to say "Hang on"!) 
You can't NOT cater for all your learners, so you do need to do this to some extent all the time. But a Teacher's Book (and these days, most other course components) will take some of that burden from you by planning activites at different levels, and providing you with ideas for dealing with the complicated issue of mixed ability.
(If you'd like to find out more about mixed-ability teaching, I'd really recommend an excellent resource book on the subject by Erika Osváth and Edmund Dudley, published by OUP, 2016.)

8. Ways to adapt the material

No matter how carefully you planned, there will always be times when you'll need to take shortcuts or to extend the material. Or you may sometimes have learners in your class with particular needs your plans didn't cater for. A teacher needs to be flexible, but how can you be flexible and still deliver optimum content? 

And just as much as every learner is different, every teacher is unique. The more we have pre-planned and provided for us by other people, the less it will all reflect our own personality. How can we tailor what's in the coursebook already to become more like us?

A good Teacher's Book will tell you where the key language or key skills are in the lesson sequence, which exercises can be dropped or set as homework or used with a different class dynamics. It will tell you (or at least give you pointers on) how to adapt (and what to adapt) to fit specific needs and requirements. It will also help you use the course material creatively, to better reflect your own personality through offering different paths through the material. 

9. Supplementary materials

And let's not forget photocopiables and Teacher's Resource Discs. Language teachers spend countless hours printing, cutting up, assembling stuff to use in their classes. Of course, there are many great activity books, resource books, websites, grammar books, and so on, to provide us with an infinite source of supplementary materials.

But a Teacher's Book offers these supplementary materials - with the added benefit that every photocopiable and every resource disk material has been developed alongside the main coursebook. Which means that every supplementary there matches the level, the topic, the language focus, the skills focus, the age range and so on of the coursebook itself. Which means that if the coursebook was suitable for your group, all these supplementaries will be suitable, too. And you don't have to go out of your way to look for them, either!

10. Inspiration for ideas

And finally, Teacher's Books offer us the insights, suggestions and ideas of at least one other teaching professional (but normally several others) - making us think, reflect on, evaluate our own ideas, beliefs, practices, and hopefully inspiring us to fresh ideas.

Conclusion

So, have I left out anything important? Are there other great uses of Teacher's Books that I didn't think about? If you'd like to read more on this subject, visit the OUP ELT Global Blog, where Julietta Schoenmann posted an article in two parts (part 1 and part 2). A more recent post by John Hughes offers another Teacher's Book author's perspective - and his article was directly responsible for making me write this one.

The pitfalls of exam preparation

What’s your main goal in teaching English? You’ll probably say something along the lines of „enabling students to communicate well in English” and perhaps also „developing students to be better people”. But have you ever had a group of students preparing for an examination? Then you know that your success or failure will be measured by not by how well they can express themselves in real life, and not even by how well they fit into society. Where there is an important exam at the end of the process, you can only succeed if your students pass the exam. It’s that simple.

What many of your students (and their parents) will expect you to do is to get them through the exam – which for them may also well mean the end of learning. Which, of course, should not be the end of the process. Learning is for life.

But what does this mean in terms of classroom practice?

EXAM PREPARATION TO-DO LIST

1. You will have to cover the exam syllabus (the topics, the grammar and vocabulary, the skills and sub-skills), and make sure you don’t miss out anything.

2. You will have to familiarise your students with all the exam task types, and provide them with strategies to complete each type of task with maximum efficiency.

3. You will have to familiarise your students with the assessment criteria – so they know how to maximise their point scores, and how to avoid losing valuable points.

4. You will have to provide students with practice and rehearsal opportunities, so when they get to the real exam, it’s not their first time completing it.

The above is just a rough shortlist of priorities.

To continue with the same train of thought, what does this mean in terms of what you’re NOT going to do in the classroom?

EXAM PREPARATION NOT-GOING-TO-DO LIST

1. You are not going to cover language points that aren’t required in the exam. Students probably won’t mind. But don’t forget that often we only teach language points because we know they’re going to be tested. Throughout my career as a learner, there has always been a massive emphasis on irregular verbs. They are certainly useful, but the reason we spent so much time memorising long lists of them was merely that they were going to feature in our exams. Think about this – is there any language you’d skip or spend less time on if it wasn’t in the exam?

2. You are going to prioritise the task types that do occur in the exam over those that don’t – which means you’re probably going to reduce task type variety. You feel responsible for your students’ success, so you make sure their exposure to exam expectations is maximised. When it comes down to a choice between, say, an open personalised speaking task and another multiple-choice gap fill, perhaps you’re going to go for the gap fill... again.

3. In order to prepare your students well and to make sure you’re not leaving even your weakest student behind, you’re going to spend a lot of time focusing on what’s needed for the exam. When pressed for time, you are not going to do too many activities which have no connection to the exam. This includes games, drama, discussion of controversial / intriguing (depending on your viewpoint) subjects, jokes and humour in general... can you continue this list? Exams are neutral, non-controversial, and let’s face it, pretty bland. Which is fine because tests are measurement tools, and it’s important to reduce unwanted extra factors, like emotional responses. But bear in mind that „pretty bland” is exactly the opposite of what language classes should be! How are you going to motivate students if you’re spending so much time doing stuff that isn’t motivating?

FINDING A BALANCE

The difficult solution is to prepare students in a way that teaches them all the real-life communication skills rather than focuses on mechanical test task preparation. For example, instead of aiming to practise a format like four-option multiple choice cloze, your aim could be on the communicative goal of the text you use, but using the mcq format to highlight some of the cohesive devices of that type of text. Or instead of comparing and contrasting two arbitrarily chosen coursebook photos, your aim could be sharing personal experiences of special occasions – through comparing and contrasting family photos of, say, weddings or graduation ceremonies. The trick would be to always aim to do both: exams as well as real life.

What I’m saying is that our general aims in language teaching and the aims of exam preparation are linked, but sometimes their priorities clash, and it will be up to you to strike the right balance and to blend learning for real life and exam preparation.

This article was originally published on the OUP ELT Global Blog on 7 April 2013 as a preview of my workshop at the 2013 IATEFL conference in Liverpool, and appears here in an updated form.

Learning in the 21st century

The topic of 21st century skills has become a buzzword in English Language Teaching recently, and although more and more people are talking about it, there is a bit of uncertainty about whether they are anything new - anything specific to the 21st century. 
Well, they are and they aren't. Learning is learning: acquiring new skills, building on and expanding knowledge, gathering experiences and so on. This has always been true, and it is still true in the 21st century. People in the past certainly used all four Cs: the four essential learning skills that are the cornerstones of 21st century learning: Communication, Collaboration, Critical thinking and Creativity. (You see? Nothing new.)
What has changed in recent decades, and certainly in my own lifetime, is the pace of change: by the time we acquire knowledge, it may well be obsolete. By the time we learn skills, we already need to update them (a bit like the shiny new software package you buy and install, which then insists on updating itself immediately before it's even willing to run, as it's already 'critically out of date'). 
So, what is to be done? What we need to become good at, and what we, teachers, need to train our students to become good at is the skill of learning itself. The skill to adapt. And that's what we talk about when we talk about 21st century learning skills. In a very tight nutshell, obviously. It's more complicated than this, but should you wish to learn more, I suggest you look up my previous related post on the subject with more details. Or download the materials I used in my recent workshop at the IATEFL Hungary Creative Café event (on 1 July, Budapest at the Libra Bookshop) with some practical suggestions for classroom activities to develop each of the four skills. (Although it goes without saying that a language class aimed at developing communication skills is already well-equipped to develop one of the Cs: Communication...)
There's still another 84 years of this century left, so I'm sure we'll have some further opportunities to explore the issue of 21st century learning - I'll keep you posted.