The Coursebook and Beyond: Choosing, Using and Teaching Outside the Text

The Coursebook and Beyond is a resource for current and future English language teachers. It has been written both for use by the individual teacher and for use in teacher training courses.

The book looks at the central role played by the coursebook in most language courses, at some of the curricular ideas behind a coursebook and at the different ways a coursebook may go about implementing these. For the most part the focus of The Coursebook and Beyond is very practical, a focus on how teachers can deal with a prescribed body of materials. The book presents ideas on how to select (or reject) a coursebook, on different ways to work with the materials within a coursebook, and on how to jump outside the text altogether where this helps to better attain the goals of the course and where the coursebook might need augmentation.

The overarching aim of The Coursebook and Beyond is to help teachers see course materials as less a fixed route and more of a suggested path for helping students achieve the goals of a course. And that teachers practicing choice in how to use a coursebook with their students - and on when to jump away from it altogether -can greatly improve how any text does its job.

This book is valuable for new teachers and also teacher trainers because it not only looks at how to best utilize a coursebook but also how to move beyond the coursebook. As we all know, coursebooks are useful up to a point, but what happens when we need more. The Coursebook And Beyond provides all this information in a very engaging and readable manner and I fully recommend it. - Thomas S.C. Farrell, Brock University

This book rightly recognises that most teachers use the coursebook as a valuable starting point for planning lessons. It gives busy teachers a full grounding in how to exploit their coursebooks in (a wide range of) innovative and practical ways. The authors draw on their long experience of teaching English in a variety of contexts overseas to provide detailed guidance for adapting, supplementing and extending coursebook activities. We particularly liked the way they have drawn on contributions from practising teachers to these bring the examples to life and show how teaching and learning English beyond the coursebook can be engaging and satisfying. - Jane and Dave Willis

Fiona Copland has extensive experience of teaching English and training teachers in Nigeria, Hong Kong, Japan and UK. She is currently Course Director of MSc TESOL Programmes at Aston University, UK.

Steve Mann is Associate Professor at the Centre for Applied Linguistics at University of Warwick. He has worked with teachers on materials development and action research for twenty years. Before that he was an English language teacher in Europe, Hong Kong and Japan.