Our new Success International English Skills for Cambridge IGCSE™ series is publishing soon. In this blog, one of our talented authors, Ingrid Wisniewska, discusses different ways you can use your coursebook creatively with your students.
Using your coursebook creatively can help you get more out of the resources and help your students to be more creative, too. And it needn’t involve a lot of extra preparation or materials. Here are a few ways you can use your coursebook to support students’ creativity.
Create new questions
Two ways of getting more mileage out of reading or listening to comprehension questions is to add some more questions or change them. Read the text, or play the audio or video again, and ask students to create two more questions to ask the class (no repeat questions allowed!). This could be a game-like competition. Another way is to change the questions. If there are True / False questions, ask students to write new multiple-choice or open-ended questions. For an extra challenge, ask students to create questions about what is not included in the text and possible reasons why. These may become research tasks for homework.
Recycle language using different skills
Try recycling the language and the ideas of an activity using different skills. For example, after reading an article you could transform it into a role-play of an interview with the writer, or with characters in the story. After doing a role-play, students could write a summary or a report of their interaction. After listening to a talk, students could write an email to the speaker, asking for more information about the topic. Another option is to have students transfer information from reading or listening to a diagram such as a flowchart, a maze or a spider map.
Re-purpose visuals
Most coursebooks use photos and illustrations to provide context and to help learners recall existing knowledge of the topic. Visuals can be used in a variety of other ways to stimulate memory and learning. Students can ask questions about the photo, imagine what the people are saying or thinking, write a caption, or invent a story about what happened before and after the scene. You might also find ways to link the picture with vocabulary and grammar in this or previous units which can make new language more memorable.
Re-sequence activities
Think about possible ways to re-sequence the activities in a unit. Could you try the role-play first, for example, then go to the vocabulary activities and come back to the role-play again at the end? In this way, students might notice some improvement in their abilities which can be very motivating. Asking students which of two activities they would like to do first (and reflecting on why) is also a good way of introducing more student autonomy in the classroom.
In conclusion, looking at ways to extend, modify, re-use or re-purpose coursebook tasks can provide a multitude of ways to get more out of your coursebook and bring greater creativity to your classroom.
Ingrid Wisniewska is an ELT author and has written numerous books for students and teachers, including Learning One-to-One (Cambridge University Press), which is a handbook for giving individual language lessons. She is also an author of our new Success International English Skills for Cambridge IGCSE™ resources.
To read more English blogs on topics such as grammar, developing sentences and much more, visit our English blog hub.
