The role of coursebooks in the digital age

In the lower secondary classroom, coursebooks are the main teaching resource, providing texts and materials, pools of exercises and tasks, a whole set of lexical items and grammatical instructions, plus media packages containing videos and audio files, sometimes extra materials and task instructions for further work beyond the teaching unit. The texts and materials in particular, mostly culturally defined thematic content, introduce and offer the respective content in question, often conceived along Landeskunde themes like a middle class family in Britain, New York city life or wildlife in Australia.

Coursebook enthusiasm?

In terms of the teenage learners’ motivation, it is difficult to see why and how such content based on traditional notions of culture should attract the students’ interest and lead to engagement and enthusiastic work. Once again, the core of the problem is how the coursebook contrasts with the unlimited access to knowledge and whole ‘content packages’ in digital environments. The coursebook will never be able to compete with the huge amount of content and knowledge on, say New York that is available online on hundreds of platforms, from encyclopedias to Google street view. In other words: If they are interested, they don’t have to wait for unit in the coursebook that offers them a small slice of a cultural reality they would like to explore.

Anything to discover?

‘Discover’ is a didactic key term here: The coursebook does normally not develop and train the students’ capability to research issues and phenomena they would like to know more about, gain deeper insight into or become experts even. Instead, the coursebook refers them to a very limited and ready-made‚ ‘closed’ type of information so that their curiosity, their will to learn more and their decision to delve deeper into a certain matter that interests them is largely ignored.

The time-lag

The same applies to recent cultural, political, medial or social developments in the present for which a coursebook cannot account for systemic reasons. It takes years to develop and publish a coursebook so that what appeared to be new and, maybe, exciting, is no longer up-to-date or state of the art. Trends are not the coursebook’s friends. These days, the enormously dynamic developments in the digital world are a major reason. New formats and whole technologies like, e.g., tiktok or Artificial Intelligence develop so fast that a coursebook is a very ‘slow’ medium that cannot possibly keep pace with the dynamics of the digital world. No wonder, then, that the teenagers in our classroom who are proficient users of YouTube, Spotify or tiktok do not recognize themselves ‘in’ the coursebook and cannot really connect to it: What the coursebook has to offer is not relevant and meaningful to them and is often a world apart from the one in which they live, communicate and act.

Content creation

However, the cultural change concerning the acquisition of knowledge and the creation of content in the digital age is of a fundamental kind. The teenagers and young adults in our language classrooms are not only proficient consumers of YouTube, Spotify or tiktok, they are also content creators themselves. Even if they are not in a developed manner, content-creation is a discursive and communicative practice they are familiar with or which is part of a set of communicative options they are aware of. Even the shortest everyday video that is shared among friends is part of this substantial change in the production and circulation of content, knowledge and information. The implications are far-reaching and have to be investigated and discussed in broader and deeper academic contexts. What is important here: It affects the whole notion of the role and design of coursebooks fundamentally since they rely on pedagogical principles of gate-keeping that run counter to content-creation in the digital age: The issues and the content in coursebooks are carefully selected and highly selective, determined by frameworks external to the respective content; coursebook content is bounded, closed and fixed. No wonder, then, that in an age of permanent online creation and circulation of content the current generation of coursebook users cannot connect to this static medium, static both in terms of content and of user practices.

Adaptive tasks and materials

For all of the reasons discussed above it is obvious that in an adaptive classroom that intends to account for and connect to the learners’ experiences, interests, knowledge and competences, the coursebook as we know it is no longer a choice. But there are also pedagogical reasons in a narrower sense. For systemic reasons, coursebook texts and materials, tasks, assignments and exercises cannot possibly address the individuals and their personalities in a given learner group or class simply because a coursebook cannot know them. There is this only one instance who can create an adaptive learning environment that may be interesting, exciting and valuable and for the learner: the teacher. They can access the students’ experiences, interests and mindset and create tasks and materials based on their observation or a valid diagnosis of the students’ talents and capacities, experiences and interests or on negotiating topics and issues with the students in participative manner. Together with the students, options can be considered and choices can be made because the students want to engage in exploring a certain issue and produce the kind of outcome with which they identify. Such an adaptive strategy is the only way students can really appropriate the matter in the question and the task that serves to delve deeper, maybe even immerse in it.

Re-designing coursebooks

In light of all these observations, considerations and thoughts: What the is the future of the coursebook in the language classroom? I will address this issue in another post in this blog (‘’Is there a future for the coursebook?”) to reflect upon and discuss the implications of such a paradigmatic shift. I see two options for the future of the coursebook.

The shift from curricular content to discursive practices

If the conventional notion of the coursebook that structures and guides a language course and provides a language learning curriculum is to be sustained, a complete and paradigmatic shift of the focus of this pedagogical medium is an imperative, a shift away from pre-defined ‘relevant content’ to ‘relevant discursive practices’. Such a coursebook will have to offer insight into and guidance for the generic forms of utterances in cultural discourses of all kinds, and will have to teach relevant discursive practices in which the teenagers and young adults in the language classroom can and would like engage. From the first year of language education, the scope of such practices will be broad, reaching from, e.g., all kinds of storytelling or argumentation (as, e.g., in comments on all sorts of digital platforms) to the creation of memes or the production of tiktok or YouTube videos.

The alternative: a digital platform as a rich learning resource

The alternative in terms of a more radical shift of the whole medium of guided learning is a turn away from the static notion of the (printed or electronic) ‘book’ to a more open, dynamic and constantly developing resource platform of language learning, e.g. in the shape of a blog. This will be administrated and fed by the coursebook publisher, preserving, maybe, the curricular character of a language course and its various stages and units. But because of its hypertextual character, linear progression is not imposed upon the user. Instead, there would be optional paths and links. Such a platform is also open for constant updates of all kinds (including content), additions and innovative multimedia input, e.g. with regard to digital and analogue generic model texts. Moreover, it also offers interactive spaces for content created by teachers and learners themselves. Such an option will in itself fundamentally change the way this meta learning resource is perceived by the learners since it is partly fed by their own contributions.

This post was inspired by conversations and discussions during the conference of the Klett Akdemie für Fremdsprachendidaktik (Klett Academy for Language Education) on the occasion of its 20th anniversary in Strasbourg on the 19th and 20th of June 2026. Thank you!