Most courses use a mixture of published books and in-house produced material. Many books start their lives as in-house material, but here we are only concerned with published books – how to choose them. In reality, we may have no choice: the books may be bought by someone else, or they may be inherited. However, at some stage, we may be responsible for buying books, or recommending their purchase, or may be able to choose which to use from existing sets of books. These considerations apply as much to EAP/study skills books as to general ELT books. The following chapters will be looking at examples of study skills books. Our purpose, in this chapter, is to see how we can choose between them.

Choice of books

How do we, in fact, decide which books to use? What factors influence our choice? Is the decision completely subjective or are there external criteria that can be applied to enable us to make a more principled choice?

Before looking at possible yardsticks for making choices between books, let us first look at the subjective element. What attracts us to a book in the first place? In practice, it may be for a number or combination of reasons: an attractive, well-designed cover; the persuasive publisher's blurb; a list of contents that seems to cover everything that we want; the level seems appropriate for the students; a clearly set out text, and practice material that appears to be user-friendly; informative teacher's notes and key; a colleague recommended it; the size is convenient; the price is right; it is available; and so on.