Adaptation Techniques in Teaching

Case #1: As the teacher, you have decided to change the order of the activities in the grammar section of the unit which has deductive grammar teaching. The unit starts with presenting the grammar point by giving the rule and then moves on with exercises and activities. However, you do not want the students to focus on the rule but to consider the sample sentences to understand the meaning first. So, you change the order of the grammar part in the book to have an inductive grammar teaching to have students discover the rule themselves.

Case #2: As the teacher, you have limited time in class. Instead of focusing on all the mechanical (controlled practice) questions in the coursebook following a grammar point, you select to cover half of them, focus on the most difficult ones and skip the others to save time.

Case #3: You think the instructions for a task in the coursebook are too long for your young learners to understand, so you put them into a step-by-step order and explain each of them.

Case #4: As the teacher, you think the number of scanning questions for the reading text in the coursebook is not enough. So, you prepare further scanning questions that may enable students to scan for more information based on capitalized (names, places, etc.) or numerical information (dates, amount, etc).

Case #5: As the teacher, you have decided to start the unit with a speaking activity which is the last activity in the same unit. The coursebook presents this speaking activity to have students speak on the topic of the unit after the unit content is covered. However, you would like to use it as a brainstorming activity because you think such a change will enable the learners to be familiar with the topic by sharing their ideas in groups.

Case #6: You have two reading texts on the same topic in the coursebook unit. Instead of using both of them, you omit one and add a YouTube video on that topic so that students may have the chance to get language input in two different forms.

Case #7: It is the first week of classes, and the students are still new to each other. In the coursebook, there is a section on speaking and giving impromptu speeches. You think it is too early to have students speak in front of the class, so you leave this section out.

Case #8: You have planned to have a group discussion activity in the coursebook with 6 groups, but the number of students is not enough even to form 3 groups. So instead of organizing a discussion in concurrent groups, you turn it into a debate where two larger groups discuss two different perspectives of the topic.

Case #9: You think the listening text in the coursebook is too difficult for your students to understand as the speaker has a heavy accent, so you ask the native speaker teacher in your school to record the text again.

Case #10: In the coursebook, you have a speaking activity where students read a long dialogue in pairs and act out. You think the activity is not communicative and would like to turn it into an information gap activity, so you write role-play cards for pairs using the information given in the dialogue, but pairs do not see each other's role cards while speaking to collect information that they do not have.