What is a good coursebook for beginners?

In a pevious post I explained why the typical syllabus at low levels is bad, but this does leave the question what is a good coursebook for beginners? Obviously, the short answer to this question is our own book Outcomes Beginner, but in this post and others I’m going to set out a bit more about what our alternative A1 / A2 syllabus is, why I think Outcomes is a good coursebook for beginners. Having said that, I am not blind to the limits of using a coursebook – even a good one – and I will note these downsides also.

An important point of principle

Before I talk about the changes to the syllabus that we’re proposing, I should state a point of principle. While there is a value in noticing and practising a particular aspect of grammar or vocabulary, it will not be mastered in that lesson. Accurate production of words or grammar in conversation/writing will be acquired for over time by multiple encounters in the same and different contexts – sometimes over a very long period of time and actually often never! Particular examples of different forms may be mastered as phrases before the underlying grammar can be said to have been acquired. If you do not believe these principles, then probably you won’t agree with anything here, or in our follow-up posts. Still, maybe we can persuade you!! Read on.

The CEFR as a guide

We could think of learners of a coursebook for beginners aiming to reach B1 as a medium-to-long-term goal. If you do, then it’s important to note that the CEFR describes a student at a B1 level as only being reasonably accurate within certain routines. Outside of these common conversations and in longer terms, a B1 student will tend to be inaccurate and more hesitant. In other words, there is a suggestion of the process of learning outlined above. 

Apart from taking into account these general CEFR descriptors a good coursebook for beginners can adopt what the CEFR describes as backwards planning. Basically, you start by considering what you believe students want / need to do at a low level; you think about the contexts students will be in, and the conversations they might normally have in those contexts; and you then think about the language which will enable these conversations. Where we may differ to others following this process is that we do not simply reduce the language to words and grammar. We recognise that chunks/phrases also have an important part to play.

Another thing to consider, is what Can-do statements we are following in a good coursebook. The CEFR can-do statements were originally produced and rated by language educators who would have been influenced by what has been traditionally taught in beginner coursebooks. As such, descriptors of ‘A’ levels may include ‘describe people’ in simple terms but not ‘give their opinion on society’ in simple terms. Yet to reach B1, students should be able to engage in basic routines about the things in the news, which would suggest at least some engagement with the topic at Beginner and Elementary. At A1 students can ask about the time, but can’t do more general requests apparently till A2. What we should bear in mind is that the CEFR itself emphasises that these can-do statements are guides – it’s a framework of reference not a rulebook.

From our point of view, low-level learners can do a much wider range of things – they will just do them ‘badly’. An opinion on society could be ‘government bad’ or ‘here, schools good’ and a successful request could be ‘move?’ As such, we’d suggest a good coursebook for beginners would try to enable a wider range of conversations than perhaps suggested by the narrow guide list of CEFR. And you will find examples of this in Outcomes Beginner such as talking about your country in Unit 10. What we do is think about the simplest ways this can be done naturally – and from the teacher’s point of view, correctly. In other words, we teach students to be able to ask What do you think of … the government, education, the health system (all in the top 100 most common nouns in English) and show how students can answer very simply ‘Bad’, ‘Schools are good here”. “Teachers don’t have a lot of money’. However, we would not expect students to be consistently accurate as a result. They will tend to revert to the ungrammatical versions in free conversation and until they have had sufficient exposure and sufficient repeated opportunities to do these kind of conversations, they will not become ‘reasonably accurate’ routines

The traditional syllabus as a guide

Having made a list of ‘conversations’ we want to enable the students to have and considered the language needed to fulfil them in simple ways, you then need to consider the order in which these conversations might be taught. In this case, we started with the traditional grammar syllabus as an initial guide. We seem to live in days where nuance is easily lost: you’re either for us or your against; it’s either awesome or it’s rubbish. While I disagree with the rigid block-by-block approach of the traditional syllabus and its underlying assumptions, the general trajectory is sensible. It would seem a bit perverse to me to start with past tense, then do ‘should’, followed by the present continuous, followed by conditionals, etc.

Be is the most common verb and saying hello and asking who someone is (name and/or job) is a very reasonable place to start a Beginner class. It makes sense to then introduce other verbs and the present tense is a good place to start there too, especially given the fact that it’s so easy in English.

A good coursebook for beginners might show more grammar sooner!

However, there are quickly things we do that break away from a traditional coursebook syllabus. If we have ‘taught’ be, why can’t students cope with there is / is there? If they have had I’m / We’re, why can’t they cope with I’m/we’re going? While the core grammar we focus on and manipulate moves in the direction of simple/basic forms to more complex ones, we also think that we may teach grammaticalized chunks to enable a more genuine interaction. So when we teach and practice forms of ‘be’ (Who’s he? What’s your name?  What’s her name?), we can also teach ‘I don’t know’ as a phrase. When we teach How much is it? we might also teach the phrase What would you like? and maybe Anything else?. When you teach Where are you from? we could also teach Do you like it? or even Have you been there? When we teach the present simple, e.g. Where do you live? we could teach And you?; when we teach and practice Is there … ? (Is there a bank near here? / There’s one …), we might also teach the pattern I’m looking for a (restaurant) called (Dotori). Hopefully you get the idea.

Give space to beginners to say more

So in each lesson we broadly practise a dialogue that’s working towards a genuine communication between students to get something done or find out about each other. The ordering of these tasks are partially determined by the main ‘new’ aspect of grammar. We might focus on this grammar somewhat traditionally (eg. showing different persons for a tense/or different verbs to use the question form), but we may sometimes only show one chunk and how that can be manipulated and used in the task. And because these tasks are based on the conversation rather than practising one grammar form, a good coursebook for beginners also gives more space for learners to either recycle previously taught forms or try and go beyond what they learnt so far. As good teachers for beginners, we can respond by either re-working what learners are trying to say or simply acknowledging that they have communicated successfully, albeit inaccurately.

Want to learn more about teaching low-level students? Try our mini-course Helping students reach B1 or our longer online teacher training course: Teaching Languages at Low Levels.