Strategies for Enhancing the Use of Textbooks in Language Classrooms at the Tertiary Level

Abstract

The majority of the literature of English Language Teaching is fundamentally derived from published course books. In many language teaching situations, much of the materials fail to meet the instructors’ expectations, and the materials are criticized for their isolation, irrelevance on taking into account of personal and local contexts and inadequate coverage of the essential aspects of language learning/teaching. Moreover, the existing materials are almost all developed and flourish in the western context, which pose some difficulties both for the teachers and for the learners to bridge them into various local contexts. This paper explores some of the strategies for ESL/EFL teachersthat they might incorporate to enhance the use of textbooks in the classroom. For this, we examine some of the popular textbooks that are commonly used by different English Language teachers at the tertiary level and we pilot some of the strategies in the classrooms in a controlled situation to observe the outcome of the implementation of these strategies. It is found that in almost all cases learner-centred work with a course book and extension of text-based tasks with real life experience have produced positive results.