Personalising your Coursebook

Erwachsenenbildung Englisch
Personalizing your Coursebook
A coursebook is written to appeal to a wide audience, the accompanying teacher’s book offers and
explains ways of working with the materials, and a resource book provides supplementary materials.
The following suggestions aim to demonstrate ways of working with your coursebook to enable you to
encourage your students to interact with their books on a personal level. Because every class is
different, the results of this interaction may be very varied, but will give the students the chance to
personalize their coursebooks. The activities suggested can be done completely in class or, depending
on the class-time you have at your disposal, prepared at home and then brought to the next class.
The suggestions are based on Unit 5 of course book A1 but you can easily adapt them to other units as
well.
Using coursebook illustrations
Do these activities before you work on the unit content to encourage the students to be creative in their
interpretations of the pictures.
Captions
Ask pairs of students to make up a caption for an illustration in the unit.
e.g.:
“You’re late!”
Autorin: Angela Lloyd
© Cornelsen Verlag GmbH & Co. OHG 2005, alle Rechte vorbehalten
1
Diese und weitere Materialien finden Sie unter
www.cornelsen-firstchoice.de
Erwachsenenbildung Englisch
Personalizing your Coursebook
“Enjoy your meal!”
Picture to story
Ask pairs of students to make up a story connecting all the photographs in the unit. You might like to
formulate questions to give some added help.
e.g.:
page 48:
What is Ben thinking?
Why is Ben sitting on the bench?
page 50:
Do Ben and the young woman know each other?
What happens next?
The pictures and me
Ask individual students to look at the illustrations and make connections between what they see and
themselves.
e.g.:
pictures of Whisky: I prefer dogs.
cartoon on page 53: I love Japanese food.
photos on page 54: I would like to visit China.
clocks on page 50: My favourite time of day is five-fifteen because I finish work then.
Autorin: Angela Lloyd
© Cornelsen Verlag GmbH & Co. OHG 2005, alle Rechte vorbehalten
2
Diese und weitere Materialien finden Sie unter
www.cornelsen-firstchoice.de
Erwachsenenbildung Englisch
Personalizing your Coursebook
Revising unit content
Do these activities after you have worked through the unit.
Unit recall
Give everyone five minutes to look back through the unit and then close their books. Ask students to
work in pairs. Now they tell each other what they learned, what happened to the characters, what
information they found most useful or interesting while working on the unit….
e.g.:
“We learned how to tell the time.”
“Schoolchildren work very hard in China.”
“X eats a lot!”
Vocabulary revision
Ask students to look back through the unit and choose and write down five words they think are
important. Students now work in small groups. In turn, they show their lists and the others have to
remember the context when the word was used.
As a variation the teacher can prepare a list and the group collaborate to remember the context.
e.g.:
main meal
quarter
afternoon nap
midnight
unusual
Creating tasks
Students look through the Language Spotlight section of the Magazine and make up their own
exercises using the ones in the book as a model. Ask students to exchange exercises as further
homework practice.
Autorin: Angela Lloyd
© Cornelsen Verlag GmbH & Co. OHG 2005, alle Rechte vorbehalten
3
Diese und weitere Materialien finden Sie unter
www.cornelsen-firstchoice.de
Erwachsenenbildung Englisch
Personalizing your Coursebook
Working with coursebook texts
Personalizing texts
Students work in pairs. They re-read one of the texts from the unit and, using this as a model, they
write a text about someone or something they know.
e.g.:
Students re-read the text about Paco’s daily routine on page 52 and then write a text about the
daily routine of the teacher or another member of the class. Anything they don’t know, they
should invent.
Making changes
Students work in pairs. Together they decide on the text or dialogue from the unit they want to work
on. Each partner writes it out, making some changes as they go along. The personalized versions of the
texts are then exchanged. Without checking the original text again, each partner tries to find the
changes and “correct” them.
You may want to limit the length of the texts to 4 –5 sentences.
e.g.:
Deng Bing Yu is a business man in Haimen in Japan. He gets up at 7.15 and starts work at
8.00. At 12.00 he goes to the canteen for his lunch. After lunch Bin Yu watches TV for 20
minutes, then he starts work again at 2.00. People in his company finish work at 6.00, but
workers in shops and other service jobs work longer.
Autorin: Angela Lloyd
© Cornelsen Verlag GmbH & Co. OHG 2005, alle Rechte vorbehalten
4
Diese und weitere Materialien finden Sie unter
www.cornelsen-firstchoice.de

Download Report