So you want an editable coursebook …

The classic ELT coursebook has been falling out of favour in certain circles for some time. The topics are too bland, they can’t possibly be of interest and relevant to all the different students they try to cater for, their methodological approaches are too rigid and don’t always fit with approaches that teachers would like to adopt, they’re too inflexible and difficult to adapt.

As someone who’s worked in ELT publishing for nearly 20 years (although never as a general coursebook author), I can see both sides of the issue. I understand the limitations that publishers are working within and the difficulties of delivering something that works for everyone when commercial restraints demand that an expensive-to-produce coursebook series will need to sell to the widest possible demographic. I also know from talking to teachers I meet from around the world that beyond the ELT Twitteratti, many ordinary teachers are actually quite happy with the status quo. At the same time though, I do agree with many of the criticisms of coursebooks and I find the current, publisher-led, writing-by-committee approach to coursebook production frustrating on all kinds of levels.

I’ve always found the “do away with coursebooks and let teachers write all their own original materials tailored to their students” argument unhelpful and unrealistic for most teachers. Recently though, I’ve read a number of articles which take a more constructive position, suggesting instead how coursebooks could be improved (see Sandy Millin and Kyle Dugan). One suggestion that I’ve seen in a number of places, and that I want to address here, is the option to make materials available in easily editable formats so that teachers can adapt them to be more relevant to their students. It sounds like a great idea, giving teachers (and students) the best of both worlds, but even leaving aside issues around students preferring print books to digital or to piles of handouts, there are a number of important issues to consider around copyright and intellectual property.

Original texts and permissions: 

Anyone who has ever written materials for publication will know that if you want to use authentic texts from external sources, there are lots of hoops to jump through to obtain permission from the copyright holders to reuse them. Some sources just point-blank refuse, others charge considerable fees and most put restrictions on exactly how the text can be reused (whether it can be changed, shortened, adapted, etc.). That means that making those texts available in a format that could be edited by teachers is generally just not possible from a legal perspective. The best that might be feasible in such a context would be to make the original text available in an uneditable form, say, as a PDF, perhaps with the accompanying activities in a separate Word document that could be edited. There are permissions issues with photos and artwork too, so those would probably need to be stripped out of any editable versions.

Intellectual property and reputation:

One reason why many copyright holders won’t allow their work to be used and adapted in any old way is because their original intent in writing the text and the message they intended to convey could too easily become distorted, misrepresenting their ideas in a way that they wouldn’t want to put their name to. Imagine you’re a political journalist who’s carefully constructed a piece to put across a particular argument and point-of-view, then someone comes along and chops it about in such a way as to miss the point, or worse still, end up suggesting an opposite view, but with your name still attached.

Arguably, ELT writers are slightly less precious when it comes to presenting their personal views in a grammar or vocab activity, but there is nonetheless, a good deal of professional expertise and principle that goes into writing ELT materials. I frequently object to changes suggested by editors to activities or even individual items that I feel would change the nature of the activity and no longer achieve the intended language-learning objective. Other times, I’ve included something to make the material more inclusive, for example, and no, I don’t want all my female scientists swapped for men who are easier to find stock photos of! When materials go out into the world with my name attached, I want to feel that even if a few compromises were made along the way, I’m still essentially happy with the content.

I fully expect teachers to adapt the materials I write - to skip activities, to write up extra questions on the board or even to make a handout with alternative activities to go along with a reading or listening text in the book. It would be a bit strange if they didn’t adapt to some extent because they know their teaching context and their students and I don’t. Generally though, it still remains clear to the students, or to whoever else might see the resulting hybrid materials (parents, colleagues, etc.), who wrote what. So if those adaptations contain language errors or changes that I wouldn’t agree with or that completely miss the point I was trying to get across to students, then that doesn’t reflect on me or damage my professional reputation or that of the publisher. If those materials were fully editable, then the line between my intellectual property and any local additions (be they brilliant or error-strewn) would become blurred and versions of the material could start circulating that bore my name, but which I would never have written myself. For me, that’s problematic. 

Of course, we could just remove authors’ names from classroom materials. Much of the work I do already goes largely uncredited apart from in tiny print on the acknowledgements page, so I don’t really have a problem with that (although I think it somewhat lessens the incentive for authors to produce great content). But that still doesn’t solve the problem of publishers (or ‘content providers’, if you will) establishing and maintaining their reputation, not to mention avoiding piracy … but that’s maybe a topic for another day …

In short, I think editable ELT materials might be possible in some form, but they would have to be constructed in such a way that certain sections of the material could not be changed and also so that any changes that were made were clearly attributed. It’s an interesting challenge that I don’t think is insurmountable, but it’s certainly not as straightforward as it might at first seem.