A Note on Textbooks

Different schools have different attitudes towards textbooks.

You will probably be provided with a textbook to use but you will also probably find that it isn't very suitable. The problem is partly the vast difference in level you will find between the strongest students in a class and the weakest students in the same class.

For example, I have a class in Grade 7 where the strongest student visits his uncle in New York every year, takes a lively interest in watching western TV and reading books in English and can hold a conversation that is almost at an adult native speaker level on just about any topic you care to think of. In the same class I have another student who cannot answer questions like "What is your name?" and "Where are you from?" His conversation begins and ends with the ritual exchange of :

"Hello, how are you?"

"I'm fine thanks, and you?"

I'm not convinced he actually understands that.

The book for the class is trivially easy for the first student and impossible for the second.

However you will find , as I said, that different schools have different attitudes.

Most schools will cheerfully let you ignore the book completely. In one school that I worked at the Chinese teachers were keenly aware that the book they were providing, though supposedly for that level, was way beyond the capabilities of almost every student in that year. They actively discouraged me from using it.

Other schools though may take the view that "the book is the book" and require you to use it. This may be as simple as letting you give a page reference to something vaguely related to your lesson but may be a requirement that you teach the chapters of the book in the right order, using every last bit of it exactly as printed on the page.

That's unusual but if that's what they want there is little you can do apart from comply in class and argue your case strongly in private with the school.

If you have taught English before, especially if you have taught it in the west, you will find another problem. The style of the books is, by our standards, amazingly old-fashioned. Modern EFL text books are bright, intersting things with easy to follow page layouts, intersting topics and a wide variety of activities. By contrast most Chinese textbooks, especially at the higher levels, are text-heavy tomes filled with the kind of grammar tests that haven't been seen in our books for at least thirty years. I'll write more about that later.

My approach is to mostly ignore the book altogether and make up my own lessons - the lessons you will see in the plans here. Where there is a chapter that has some connection with my topic I give a page reference at the start of the lesson. If there is a dialogue that connects I have two stronger students read it out while the others follow in the book.

I also tell them that they can keep the book open and use it to help them with the tasks.

That's it though. Apart from that I rarely touch the book at all.

What you do will depend on your own feelings about how lessons should be organised and what the school wants you to do. If they really won't budge and insist that you do it all "by the book" then I'm afraid the plans and resources in this blog will be useless to you.