Hi Inna,
Do you have access to other EFL classrooms?
You have read some respected and experienced British trainers/writers. But you also need to observe as many classes as you can and watch how other teachers use their textbooks. Ask them questions about the text book (why do you use this book?, what do you think are its strengths/weaknesses? How could it be improved? What would you do if there was NO textbook?). Then ask the students too (Do they enjoy it? Is it helping them? What do they not like?)
By their nature, textbooks are aimed at a general audience - they are not written for THIS class, in THIS country at THIS time, so how do we adapt them to our own classes and our own aims? We can be selective about the material, we can supplement it, we can adapt it. What do the teachers you know do?
When you have had some conversations with other teachers, you can start to look at the general strengths and weaknesses of the books and start looking at strategies that might improve how they are used.
Ideas for contents:
Why are textbooks used at all?
Who chooses them?
Are they suitable for their purpose?
Why is one chosen and another one rejected? (it �s not always about what is best for the students)
Pick a book that is widely used in classrooms in Romania and use that as your Case Study
How do teachers adapt that book to their needs?
Which teachers do that and why?
What could help them to do that better? (training? Romanian language �helper � texts? peer support groups?)
I hope that gives you some ideas to get you started :-) It �s an interesting topic but not an easy one.
Tap
