Hi, there.

Most teachers I know feel trapped between 2 worlds. Their school demands the coursebook. Their instincts tell them their students need something more real, more human, more alive. So they march through the exercises, check the answers and move on…wondering why their students aren't really talking.

The coursebook isn't the enemy, but treating it like a script is. I've seen lessons where students spent 20 minutes matching adjectives and answering questions about people they've never met, with barely 5 minutes of genuine communication. The language stays on the page instead of coming out of students' mouths, where it belongs.

Here's how I'd fix that without throwing the book out:

1. Start with a question nobody can get wrong. Most coursebook lead-ins ask "Would you like to do this?" which immediately excludes students who can't afford to travel or haven't had certain experiences. I'd replace it with an evaluative question anyone can answer - which of these would stress you out most? Which feels most familiar? - and watch the conversation take off.

2. Move the personal response questions to the front. Most coursebooks bury them at the end of the listening or reading section. I'd use them as my lead-in instead, so students have something personal invested before they even open the book.

3. After any vocabulary exercise, make students use the words immediately to describe something real from their own lives - a place they know, a person, an experience. That's where language actually sticks.

4. Add real stakes to speaking tasks. Instead of abstract role-plays, give students a genuine constraint - a specific person to help, a real budget, an actual decision to make. Suddenly there's a reason to talk.

5. Ditch the answer key feedback stage. While students do speaking tasks, I'd circulate with a notepad, collect their actual language - errors, interesting collocations, vocabulary they reached for but didn't have - and feed back on that instead.

The page I'm sharing is from Empower B1 by Cambridge University Press -  a pretty typical unit on cities and places that you'll find in almost any general English coursebook. Hit reply and tell me: which coursebook do you use, love or hate? I'm planning to go much deeper on this inside my Reflective Teaching Studio - full lesson analyses, specific pages, exactly how I'd Dogmify them in real time. Your suggestions will shape what I work on first. See the example I shared here.

P.S.The Studio opens in May, but applications are open now. It's a private and exclusive community for English teachers, school owners and academic managers who are done figuring it all out alone -  people who want clearer thinking, stronger classroom judgement and direct access to how an experienced trainer approaches real teaching situations. The kind of professional support most of us never got on our CELTA, never got in our schools and have been looking for ever since. Join here: https://tally.so/r/1AWrpW