Textbook Consumption in the Classroom: Analyzing a Classroom Corpus

This study contributes to current research on foreign language textbook use by analyzing Teaching Assistants’ (TAs) textbook use. Three TAs, teaching different sections of the same intermediate level course, were observed and audiotaped during the teaching of a book chapter, i.e., five lessons of fifty minutes each. The lessons were verbatim transcribed to create a classroom corpus. McDonough, et al. (2013) criteria were used to identify textbook adaptations and Shawer's (2010) strategies for in-classroom curriculum delivery were explored. Results show that adaptation of activities was a very frequent process showing instances of all of McDonough et al.’s categories, with the exception of simplifying. By far the most recurrent adaptation was deleting. Despite using the same textbook and syllabus, the lessons of each TA turned out differently because of their adaptations and their own teaching priorities. Thus, these TAs showed strategies of both curriculum-transmitters and curriculum-developers (Shawer, 2010).