Introduction

If I had been asked what I wanted from coursebooks when I was teaching languages in Japan, England, Singapore and Oman in the last 30 years, my answer would have always been the same: ‘I want coursebooks that are so engaging, inspiring, fl exible and effective that I can just teach without much extra work.’ In reality, I had to adapt materials every time I used them. For example, the Ministry-approved coursebooks often seemed to me so constrained by a syllabus, by rigid methods and by exams, that I found it difficult to make use of them. Global coursebooks from English-speaking countries, on the other hand, seemed impressive, with more fashionable approaches promising success, but their contents seemed too alien to be imported directly into my classrooms. The only time that adaptation was minimal was when I had tailor-made the materials myself. My language-teaching colleagues in all the institutions I worked in often grumbled how language teachers have to work harder compared with other subject teachers, whose content and approaches seemed to remain consistent and who do not have to adapt materials or produce supplements. Even after all these years, my ideal materials only exist in my dreams and my lament seems to echo amongst my colleagues from all over the world. Surely teachers’ needs and wants should have been taken more seriously by now?

From the 1980s to the early 1990s learner variables attracted a lot of attention in the research (Ellis 1994 ; Larsen-Freeman and Long 1991 ). The increasing global need for English as a lingua franca also led to explorations of learner-centred curricula (Johnson 1989 ; Nunan 1988 ) and of needs analysis (Hutchinson and Waters 1987 ). Coursebooks refl ected this change and their blurbs often emphasised that their product was designed to satisfy learners’ needs and interests.

From the late 1990s to 2000s L2 learners’ profiles have become far more complex and learner variables have attracted even more attention (Doughty and Long 2003 ; Ellis 2008 ). The portraits of L2 users these days show incredible diversity (Cook 2002 ; Graddol 1997 , 2006 ). Some learners, for example, may be immigrants at various socioeconomic and linguistic levels, others may be young learners studying content subjects in a target language in their own countries, and others might need different levels of international communication skills in their professions.