The activities which typically feature in L2 coursebooks have changed very little in the 50 years in which I have been involved in using, writing, evaluating and advising on such coursebooks. This is understandable because such typical activities as matching, true/false, sentence completion and choosing words from a box are relatively easy to write, easy to use, can be readily employed as classroom tests and provide easy practice in doing typical examination-type tasks. Unfortunately, though, most of them seem to be of little value in facilitating language acquisition or in helping learners develop communicative competence (see Tomlinson & Masuhara, 2013; Ellis, 2016). They might be of some additional value to motivated learners with the opportunity and inclination to look out for English outside the classroom (Tomlinson, 2013) but then most users of coursebooks (especially in rural Asia) are not motivated and do not look out for English.

The perpetuation of the typical coursebook activity despite the lack of evidence of positive effect is true of global coursebooks published by British and American publishers for worldwide consumption and is also true of many coursebooks published for use in Asia. Certainly I have not come across many exceptions among the coursebooks I have seen in use in China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand or Vietnam in the last 20 years. We tried to focus on more principled activities in English for Life (Tomlinson et al., 2000) but the publishers and the Ministry of Education in some of these countries put pressure on us to include more stereotypical activities, as did the publishers of Success with English for Primary Schools (Tomlinson et al., 2003) in China. Hitomi Masuhara and I did manage to publish a text-driven coursebook for Japanese university students without many stereotypical activities, Use Your English (Tomlinson & Masuhara, 1994) but it sold hardly any copies.