Teaching without a coursebook

by Adrian Underhill Like many teachers I quite often choose not to use a coursebook. In this article I would like to put forward some of my reasons for making that choice, and to outline what my class does without one. I then refer to how this has affected my own development as a teacher and finally I offer some dimensions for personal profiling that I have found helpful. In the references to class practice I am assuming 1) a class at any level other than beginner, 2) that the students each have a current reader and an appropriate monolingual learners' dictionary. For me this is the basic kit for working without a coursebook and without most of the usual supplementary materials. Familiar arguments I am familiar with, and sympathetic to, the usual arguments in favour of coursebooks: they provide a syllabus, a graded sequence, a focus and direction, vocabulary and structure, a reference, a measure of progress, planned activities, texts, tapes, revision, occasional new ideas, and so on. These things they certainly do, but does it follow that these things cannot also be present in the absence of a coursebook? 'Materials Operator' I have learnt a lot from using published materials and the accompanying teachers' books, especially in my first years of teaching. At the same time I have also found that materials, especially coursebooks, can come between me and my students, preventing me from directly experiencing and responding to the moment by moment energy and vitality of their own learning experience. If I'm not careful I reduce myself to a 'materials operator', separated from my learners by a screen of 'things to do'. What I really want is to study how I use myself to facilitate learning as it unfolds in the here and now in front of my eyes. Inherent problems One inherent problem is that the coursebook is written by someone else, somewhere else, who has never met my students or me, and does not know our backgrounds or our learning styles. The resulting textbook is necessarily a record of the author's end publisher's general assumptions about what my students may need to learn, and about what process of learning is likely to be good for them. Do I share these values? These absentee authors write the material which is then imposed on my students who have to work through it. Is that the only way of working? Why should the total process be split in two, only half of which happens in the classroom? From where comes the assumption that students should do only half of the total task? Why impose material

from somewhere else if they can make their own using their own resources as well as mine? Working without a coursebook Most teachers invite students to write stories and dialogues. Well, why not take their creations one step further and use them as the basis for all the types of elaboration, consolidation and practice which at the moment is done using the coursebook material? Instead of processing material written by someone else they can create their own material based on what they want to say and what they are able to say. This yields two over lapping phases. Creation, which roughly corresponds to what the author usually does, and Exploitation, which roughly corresponds to the things we usually do with a coursebook. So, If we want a dialogue we write it, If we want a text we write one, If we want a picture we draw one, If we want a tape we make one, If we want questions we write them, If we want an exercise we construct one, If we want to work with vocabulary we put ourselves in the position of needing it, If we want a dictation we write one, or choose it from the reader, If we want a role play we improvise it, or else we plan and write the parts, If we want to go to the language laboratory we negotiate which of this material we want to practise, and how to format it for lab use, If we want answers, we turn to resource books, especially the monolingual learners' dictionary, And if we need published text or tape material, then we find it. We take this raw material and negotiate its correctness, we hone it and refine it, practise it, record it, tell it, act it out, draw it, summarise it, extend it, transform it, improvise it, and so on. In all of this there is a workshop atmosphere. with our own everyday life events and interests as the source material. During the creation phase students quite naturally work from the edge of what they can do in English, from the frontier of their knowledge. I add what they need if they can't provide it from their combined resources. In this way I don't teach a new structure or vocabulary item but simply put it into circulation when it is needed. The students take it

and put it to work straight away, usually without any complicated explanations. Later, in the exploitation phase, we may study the detailed linguistic points, though that often turns out to be unnecessary. By working with the process in this way each lesson becomes a rich event in itself, with naturally occurring student errors highlighting the collective inner syllabus of the class. Errors thus become welcome signposts as to what to work on, rather than tiresome deviations from a predetermined plan. My own development as a teacher These reifications have helped me to clarify the important role that published materials, coursebooks in particular, have played in my own development as a teacher. I see how my reliance on them when I started teaching not only fed me with classroom skills and knowledge about the language, but also gave me the confidence which allowed me to become gradually less dependent on them. This is intimately linked with other aspects of my development. I can profile this development by stating some assumptions which underpinned my classroom behaviour during my first few years of teaching. These assumptions are in the left column below. The right column offers a different set of behaviours based on different assumptions, towards which I have been moving. In each case the two polarities set up a dimension within which I can reflect on how much choice of movement I really have. I do not value either polarity in itself. What I value is to be able to move appropriately, to be at the right point at the right time during a lesson. Here are just a few dimensions that are relevant to me, you will have your own. Dimensions for Personal Profiling
I am: A Teacher We focus on: What Product The topic Therefore: I know it/they don't We do it in: A Classroom One implicit message is: Be correct As a result mistakes are: To be avoided And I ask questions: To elicit a right answer To learn something myself Welcome; part of the process See what happens A Workshop We are on the same side of the learning fence How Process The way we work on the topic A Helper/Facilitator

So I tend to: Listen to their language Listen to their process as well as their language I treat learning as being: From outside in I view the syllabus as: An Outer Syllabus Linear Imposed Activities are: Decided by me/the book Time is: Mine This means: I can get impatient I respect the time it takes Ours Negotiated and naturally arising An Inner Syllabus Organic Determined by the learners From inside out Starting from the book Starting from them

Working without a coursebook gives me more space in which to explore these dimensions and to open up previously uncharted territory in my experience of noticing and fostering learning. Like any adventure it is also risky and fraught with problems, and that in itself helps to keep me alert and to remember my aim, "How can I become the best facilitator of learning, in myself and in others, that I personally can be?" And at each step "How can I bring what I have learnt through not using a coursebook, to bear on using a coursebook again, but with a greater awareness of the dimensions of what is possible?" Adrian Underhill International House Hastings