One of the key skills in EFL/ESL teaching is using a textbook effectively - and it’s not easy! Most of the lessons we have to teach are of 45-60 minute duration and relatively few textbooks are designed with this reality in mind. If getting your students to speak well is your goal, then read on…

What you get in textbooks, are lengthy units/modules, and if you followed the activities in sequence, you would not get a one hour lesson or a series of one hour lessons that would be in any way effective but in fact very unbalanced and certainly non-interactive.

Many new and inexperienced teachers are of course aware of this, but you can be forgiven if this hadn’t dawned on you because very few preliminary teaching qualifications focus properly on this key skill.

In these units, there is usually a decent preliminary discussion but after that, the items which follow, while useful and effective in their own right, would not give your lesson a good structure if followed in the order in which they are presented.

The skill we need, is to mine 50 or 60 minute lessons from all this stuff in combination with supplementary materials which you have to find elsewhere or make yourself. Very often these supplementary materials are needed to get students to speak i.e. good communicative activities.

There are often questions for discussion in there and perhaps information gap tasks where one student’s information is on one page and a partner’s on another page and so on, but if these are too cheesy or uninspiring, you have a problem! What you need now are good supplementary materials. I’ll deal with this in another entry.

To begin with, we need a good structured lesson. Although there are hundreds of ways to do this, I think a good first step would be to become familiar with PPP (Presentation, Practice, Production) This method is very far from perfect. Perhaps you’ll abandon it completely later in your development. But this method is a good way to get you thinking about structure and it can help you decide what to use in your textbook and what to omit or delay.