Teaching English When the Textbook Runs Out
Most classrooms we work in have fewer books than pupils, and some have none at all. That is a constraint worth planning around rather than apologising for.
In a good week, a Grade 6 class of fifty-two might have eleven English textbooks between them. They are shared four or five to a copy, they are three years old, and about a third of the pages have come loose. This is not an unusual situation and it is not going to resolve itself, so the useful question is not how to get more books but how to teach well with what is actually in the room.
The instinct of most teachers, ourselves included, is to treat the shortage as a problem to work around: to copy the book onto the board so that everyone has access to the same text. That works, but it quietly imports the book method into a room that could be doing something better. A textbook is designed for a pupil sitting alone with a pencil. A room of fifty pupils is designed, whether we like it or not, for talking.
What the shortage actually costs you
It is worth being precise about what is lost when there are not enough books, because it is less than teachers fear. Books carry four things: a sequence, a body of texts, exercises, and the answers to those exercises. Only two of those are hard to replace.
The sequence is genuinely valuable, and it is the reason we publish full schemes of work rather than isolated activities. A teacher covering English alongside two other subjects should not have to invent an order for the language; that is work someone can do once and everyone can reuse. The body of texts matters too, particularly at secondary level, where pupils need to meet English they did not hear from their teacher.
Exercises and answer keys are the parts most easily replaced, and often improved on. An exercise in a book is silent, individual, and identical for every pupil. The same language point practised in pairs is louder, faster, and self-differentiating, because pupils naturally produce sentences at the level they can manage.
Three substitutions that work
These are not clever ideas. They are the three moves we see experienced teachers in monastic schools make almost automatically, and they are worth naming so that newer teachers can make them deliberately.
- Replace the reading passage with the blackboard, but shorten it. A text a class can read together in four minutes and then work on for twenty is worth more than a page they spend the whole lesson decoding. Every reading text we publish is deliberately blackboard length for this reason.
- Replace the written exercise with a spoken one, then write afterwards. Pupils who have said a structure eight times in pairs write it far more accurately than pupils who have only seen it. The writing then takes five minutes instead of twenty-five.
- Replace the answer key with the class. Marking together, out loud, with a count of how many pupils chose each answer, tells you more about what to reteach than a pile of collected books ever will, and it costs you no evening hours.
The one thing not to substitute
Pupils still need something in their own hands to keep. An exercise book, however cheap, is the record of the year: it is what a pupil revises from, what a parent sees, and what the following teacher inherits. Where budgets are tight it is more useful to protect the supply of exercise books than to chase a class set of textbooks.
A class with no textbooks and full exercise books is in a better position than a class with a book each and empty ones.
Planning for it rather than around it
When we write materials, we assume no photocopier, no textbook for every pupil, and no reliable electricity, because that is what most of our members have. That assumption changes the design rather than reducing it. Board work is drawn out in full so it can be copied in a minute. Worksheets always have a board version. Speaking activities are structured tightly enough to survive a class of sixty.
None of this is a compromise position. Some of the strongest English teaching we have seen happens in rooms with a blackboard, a piece of chalk, and a teacher who has planned the lesson properly. The books, when they arrive, are a help. They were never the lesson.
Does this match what you see in your classroom?
We write these from what members tell us. If your experience is different, or you have adapted something here and it worked, that is exactly what we want to hear about.