Innovation in Language Learning

Course books in EFL classrooms often fail to cater for the needs, learning styles, and interests of individual learners in specific teaching contexts. When teachers fail to recognise the need for establishing a learning environment that fosters a more personalised approach to the given content, they run the risk of being trapped inside the boundaries drawn by course book authors. Recognizing that students learn at their own pace and succeed in different ways, teachers should take this diversity into consideration when teaching the target language and developing their materials in order to keep a balance among students' language learning needs, preferences, motivations, and their affective needs. (Pardo & Tellez, 2009). In order to maximise the opportunities for learning and extend the ways the course book content and exercises could be exploited, teachers are increasingly looking for techniques and methods that will help them face the challenge and appeal to more diverse learning styles. This poster presentation will provide practical and creative ways of course book exploitation that have been applied in a Turkish learning context, the ultimate aim of which was to sensitively cater for individualistic differences, mainly through integrated-skills tasks.

Keywords: Course book, material exploitation, individual learners;