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Date:
March, 2016
In recent years, many EFL teachers have become progressively more aware of the need
for textbook adaptation. Almost everywhere teachers turn, whether it is to a book, an online
course, or an academic event, advice for evaluating and analyzing textbooks showers them.
Although much of this advice is commercially motivated by those eager to sell teaching manuals,
some of it, especially that advocating a careful teaching reflection, merits serious attention. Such
reflection, if it consists of systematic data gathering and solid analysis and if a group of
colleagues or scholars favors it, can provide numerous benefits. Among other things, textbook
adaptation maximizes the appropriacy of teaching materials in context, improves teaching, and
increases teachers evaluation.
The first of these benefits, the appropriacy of teaching materials, is immediate. Good
teachers are continually striving to bridge the gap between the strengths of a textbook and the
needs of those who want to learn from it. They identify areas of mismatch and deal with them so
that the sections and the exercises are more relevant to the learners that use them. As a result,
teachers end up embarking on expanding the appropriacy of their materials, which makes them
change some of the internal characteristics of a textbook in order to better suit their particular
groups or needs (McDonough & Shaw, p. 85). This search for appropriacy ultimately allows
them not only to increase the relevance of the textbook to learners interests and needs, but also
to localize it according to the new demands of the EFL context.
References
Islam, C., & Mares, C. (2003). Adapting Classroom Materials. In B. Tomlinson (Ed.), Developing
Materials for Language Teaching (pp. 86-100). New York: Cambridge University Press.
McDonough, J. & Shaw, C. (2003). Materials and Methods in ELT: A Teachers Guide (2nd ed).
United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing.
Tomlinson, B. (2011). Materials development in language teaching (2nd edition). United
Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
Tsiplakides, I. (2011). Selecting an English coursebook: Theory and practice. Theory and practice
in language studies, 1(7), 758-764.