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This unit covered the use of textbooks and learning material during a class. The main focus was to identify both the advantages and disadvantages these can bring.
Textbooks can be useful, especially for the more inexperienced teacher, as they provide a good balance between vocabulary, grammar, and tested-out exercises, as well as ensuring some continuity with the teaching program and student's progress. On the other hand, it is important to point out textbooks can also be seen as boring by the students, and make the lesson predictable. The material itself may not be suited to the class needs, and can end up making the teacher less creative, and usually will not focus on the language specific issues of each nationality, as they are made for a wide audience.
A good teacher will be able to implement the use of a course book with some creative material that tackles the class-specific issues not covered by the textbook. This can be achieved with using both authentic and created materials. The former can be articles, books, movies, tapes etc a native speaker would be exposed to. Although using these can give the class confidence, expose them to real life material, and be tailored to the student's interests, it is important to point out the material is not tailored for a specific English level, and therefore teachers should be careful when choosing what authentic material to use.
The advantage of using created material is to ensure the activities are tailored to the student's English level. Created material consist in crossword puzzles, flashcard, gap-filling activities, etc.
The main aim of this unit was to highlight how a good teacher should take advantage of all materials available to them, and make sure they complement each other to achieve the best results in class.
