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[Bud Powell]

If you have a pretty good book to start with, use it, but most teachers that I know have collected their own supplemental materials through the years.

In most public universities and colleges in which I've taught, I've been given free reign to add significant amounts of supplemental material. I've had only one class (that I remember) in which I needed very little supplemental material. It was a business English book which presented substantial material pertaining to international trade. The only thing that it lacked were situational dialogs that gave the students the opportunity to use the knowledge in dialog. I created situations for that.

Always "By-the-Book"? You may not want to follow the book 100%, and your school may not even expect it.

[Non Sequitur]

There is a downloadable mingle resource emphasising Tourism English.

[golsa]

I have mixed feelings about this. I know a lot of people dislike course books, but one thing I've noticed is that the high quality international language schools almost always use them as the backbone of their courses.

It would be difficult to imagine a minimally trained EFL teacher (read: CELTA or less) actually being able to assemble a curriculum and materials that could move students from CEF B1 to B2 in ~80-100 class hours. I've no doubt that someone who has a DELTA or MA in teaching English as a foreign language could do it, but we're talking about China and very few of these caliber of teachers are working in China.

I've worked at plenty of cowboy outfits where I was told to "just find something on the internet" for classes. Yea, it's possible to do that and keep students happy, but it doesn't mean they're making any real progress.

While working at such places, I often got students started on New English File instead of randomly cobbled together materials and the responses have unanimously been something like "Wow! Things are no longer chaos! You learn something and then have to reuse it over and over and you actually learn it. Before, the teacher came in the room with a random topic each day, but with this book it feels like I'm making progress."

One thing I really noticed while working in China is that students often have gaps in their skills. For example, an advanced level class had a huge vocabulary and could generally converse at the advanced level, but would fall apart if I tried an intermediate listening lesson. In retrospect, I understand that it's because they had a very limited understanding of sentence stress and connected speech.

The beauty of good coursebooks is that they at least attempt to address the issues of sentence stress and connected speech from the start. I don't think the books are perfect and now go out of my way to teach more of it to beginners every time I present language.

So if I had a choice between using a good course book (New English File, Face 2 Face, Speak Out, New Total English, and so on) or have to burden the responsibility of creating everything on my own, I'd go with the course book every single time. Heck, I just refused a job to run a summer program today because they wanted me to create a 21 day curriculum and materials from scratch.

You can always adapt the books and other materials as you see fit. Having them as a road map will save you tens or hundreds of hours of work as it's quite easy to replace this and that as you plod along. I love the New English File series, but have replaced about 15% of it with self-created materials and guided discovery worksheets that follow personal stories I use to present language.

[Bud Powell]

"and so on..."