How to Adapt an ESL Coursebook (and When to Teach Without One)

To adapt an ESL coursebook, start by deciding what each unit is trying to achieve, then cut or shorten anything that does not serve that aim, add material where students need more practice, personalise topics so they connect to your students’ lives, and reorder activities if a different sequence works better. Teaching without a coursebook, sometimes called Dogme or materials-light teaching, can work well with confident teachers and conversation-focused classes, but most teachers get the best results from using a coursebook as a framework rather than a script.

Key takeaways

• A coursebook is a tool, not a lesson plan. You do not have to do every exercise, in order, as written.
• The five main ways to adapt material are adding, cutting, changing, reordering and personalising.
• Start every unit by identifying its main aims, then judge every activity against them.
• Personalisation is the quickest and most effective adaptation: the same grammar point becomes far more engaging when it is about students’ own lives.
• Teaching without a coursebook can produce excellent lessons but needs confidence, strong language awareness and careful record-keeping.
• Many schools require you to cover the coursebook, so adapt within the syllabus rather than abandoning it.

Why adapt a coursebook at all?

Coursebooks are written for a huge, imagined average class. A book designed to sell in dozens of countries has to work for teenagers in Madrid, office workers in Seoul and university students in Bogotá. No single book can match the interests, needs and pace of the specific group in front of you.

That is why experienced teachers rarely teach a coursebook unit exactly as it appears. Some activities will be too easy or too hard for your group. Some topics will fall flat. Some practice stages will be too short for students who are struggling, and some will drag for students who already know the material. Adapting the book closes the gap between what the publisher imagined and what your students actually need.

There is a practical side as well. In most language schools you will be handed a coursebook on your first day and told which units to cover by the end of term. Learning to adapt efficiently means you can cover the syllabus while still teaching lessons that feel tailored, without spending hours creating materials from scratch. If prep time is your main concern, our guide to cutting ESL lesson prep time has more ideas.

The advantages and limits of coursebooks

Coursebooks get criticised a lot in teacher training, but they have real strengths. They provide a structured syllabus that recycles language over time. They offer consistent level control, so texts and tasks are pitched appropriately. They give students something to review at home and a sense of progress. And they save new teachers from having to design every lesson themselves.

Their limits are just as real. Topics can be bland or dated, particularly in books designed to avoid anything controversial. Dialogues can sound unnatural. Practice is often too brief. Material may be culturally irrelevant to your students. And a teacher who follows the book page by page can end up teaching the book rather than the class.

Good adaptation keeps the strengths and fixes the weaknesses.

Start with the aims

Before you change anything, look at the unit as a whole and ask what it is trying to achieve. Most units have a clear language focus, such as a grammar point and a vocabulary set, plus one or two skills, such as reading for detail or giving opinions in a discussion. The contents page and the teacher’s book usually spell this out.

Once you know the aims, every activity becomes easier to judge. Does this exercise help students reach the aim? Is it the best way to do so for this class? If an activity does not serve the aim, or serves it badly, it is a candidate for change. This also stops adaptation from turning into simply skipping anything you find dull.

Five ways to adapt coursebook material

1. Adding

Add material when students need more than the book offers. The most common example is practice: coursebooks often give one short exercise on a new grammar point, which is rarely enough. Add a drill, a speaking activity or a short personalised writing task. You might also add a lead-in to build interest before a reading, extra vocabulary that students will need for a discussion, or a short video clip to bring a dry topic to life. Our list of free TEFL resources is a good place to find supplementary material quickly.

2. Cutting

Cut or shorten activities that students do not need. If the class already uses a structure accurately, you can move quickly through the controlled exercises and spend the time on freer practice. If a reading has ten comprehension questions, choose the four that matter most. Cutting is not laziness. It frees up time for the activities that will make the biggest difference.

3. Changing

Change an activity when the idea is good but the format does not suit your class. A written exercise can become a speaking task. A gap-fill can become a team competition. An individual task can become pair work. A listening comprehension can become a prediction game, where students guess the answers before they listen. Small changes to how students interact with the material often transform a flat activity.

4. Reordering

Reorder activities when a different sequence works better. You might move a speaking task to the start of the lesson to see what students already know before teaching the grammar. You might teach the vocabulary section before the reading rather than after, so students are not struggling with unknown words. Some teachers teach units out of order to match the school calendar or a topic that is in the news.

5. Personalising

Personalising means connecting material to students’ own lives, opinions and experiences. It is the single most powerful adaptation you can make, and often the easiest. If the book practises the present perfect with sentences about a fictional character’s travels, ask students about their own experiences instead. If the reading is about a celebrity’s daily routine, follow it with students comparing their own routines. Students remember language they have used to talk about themselves far better than language they have used to talk about a stranger.

Making coursebook topics more engaging

Many coursebook topics are chosen to be safe for every market, which can make them feel distant. A few simple moves help.

Localise the content. If a unit on cities features London and New York, add examples from the city where you are teaching or the students’ home towns. If a unit on food features dishes your students have never eaten, ask them to describe local equivalents.

Update dated material. Units about technology, music or popular culture date quickly. Keep the language aim, but swap the examples for something current.

Add an opinion stage. Coursebook texts often present information without asking students what they think. Adding a single question, such as “Do you agree?” or “Would this work in your country?”, turns a reading exercise into a discussion.

Use the images. Coursebook pages are full of photos that are rarely exploited. Ask students to describe them, predict the content of a text from them or invent a story about the people in them.

Adapting for mixed levels

Most classes include stronger and weaker students, and the coursebook is pitched at the middle. You can adapt the same material for different levels without preparing separate lessons.

For a reading text, give stronger students more detailed questions while others answer the main ones. For a speaking task, give weaker students a list of useful phrases or sentence starters and give stronger students an extra challenge, such as using three new words in their answer. Pair students strategically: sometimes stronger with weaker so one supports the other, sometimes similar levels together so both are challenged appropriately. And always have an extension task ready for students who finish early.

Adapting a coursebook for online lessons

Coursebooks designed for classrooms need some adjustment online. Pages that are fine on paper can be hard to read on a shared screen, so crop exercises, enlarge text and show one activity at a time. Use annotation tools so students can underline, circle and write on the page together. Replace activities that need movement, such as mingling or board races, with breakout rooms, polls or the chat box. In one-to-one online lessons, you have even more freedom to personalise, because every example can be tailored to one student.

Teaching without a coursebook

Some teachers prefer to work largely without a coursebook. The best-known version of this approach is Dogme ELT, developed in the early 2000s by Scott Thornbury and colleagues, which argues for lessons built around conversation and the language that emerges from it, rather than pre-prepared materials. A Dogme-style lesson might start with a simple question, such as what students did at the weekend, and the teacher then works with the language students produce, highlighting useful phrases, reformulating errors and building on what comes up.

Materials-light teaching has real advantages. Lessons are highly relevant, because they come from students’ own interests. Students get a lot of speaking practice. And the teacher responds to what students actually need at that moment rather than what the book planned months earlier.

It also has demands. The teacher needs strong language awareness to spot and explain emerging language on the spot. Without careful notes, it is easy to lose track of what has been covered and to neglect systematic grammar and vocabulary development. Some students, particularly those preparing for exams or used to traditional teaching, may feel that a lesson without a book is not a “real” lesson.

For most new teachers, the practical answer is not all or nothing. Use the coursebook for structure and syllabus, and bring in materials-light techniques, such as conversation-led warmers, student-generated topics and responsive language work, to make lessons more alive.

When teaching without a coursebook works best

Materials-light teaching tends to work best with conversation classes, intermediate and advanced students, small groups and one-to-one lessons, and private students who want to improve fluency rather than follow a syllabus. It is harder to apply with beginners, who need more structured input, with exam preparation classes that must cover specific task types, and in schools that require you to follow a set course.

If you do teach without a book, keep a simple record for each lesson: topic, key language that came up and any homework. Over time this becomes your own syllabus, and it lets you recycle language systematically.

What about school requirements?

Many language schools and bilingual schools require teachers to cover a set number of coursebook units each term, and parents or companies paying for courses often expect to see the book being used. Adapting the coursebook is almost always acceptable; ignoring it usually is not.

If you are new to a school, ask your director of studies what is expected. Some schools are happy for you to adapt freely as long as you cover the language in each unit; others want you to complete specific pages or tests. Working within those expectations while still personalising and adapting is a valuable professional skill and something interviewers often ask about. Our guide to common TEFL interview questions includes questions on materials and planning.

A worked example: adapting a unit on travel

Imagine a B1 unit on travel. The book includes a reading about a famous explorer, a grammar section on the present perfect for experiences, a short gap-fill and a discussion question at the end.

Reorder: start with the discussion question, asking students in pairs where they have travelled and what was memorable. This gives you a quick view of what they can already do with the present perfect.

Cut: reduce the reading’s eight comprehension questions to the three that best check understanding of the main ideas.

Personalise: after the grammar section, replace the book’s sentences about the explorer with a “Find someone who…” activity based on the class’s real travel experiences.

Add: include a short freer speaking task in which students plan a dream trip in groups and present it, using the language from the unit.

Change: turn the gap-fill into a quick team competition at the end of the lesson as a review.

The unit’s aims stay the same, and the lesson still covers the coursebook content, but students spend much more of it talking about themselves and using the language meaningfully.

Frequently asked questions

See the frequently asked questions section on this page for answers to common questions about adapting coursebooks.

Related reading

For the overall structure of a lesson, see our lesson planning tips for new TEFL teachers. When you need to present the grammar in a coursebook unit, our guide on how to teach grammar to ESL students walks through it step by step. To make sure students get plenty of practice, read how to reduce teacher talking time, and for materials to add, see TEFL classroom resources.

Ready to start?

Knowing how to evaluate and adapt materials is one of the skills that helps new teachers stand out. Our accredited 120-hour TEFL course covers lesson planning and materials, and the Level 5 TEFL diploma goes further into materials evaluation and design. Both are studied online, at your own pace.