Photocopiable Materials
Worksheets, activity cards, and other handouts that publishers explicitly licence for classroom reproduction. The photocopiable label appears on materials (usually inside teacher's books, resource packs, and methodology titles) that publishers expect teachers to copy in normal classroom quantities, despite their being under copyright.
The licence in practice
A typical photocopiable notice grants permission to reproduce the marked pages for use in the purchaser's own classroom, subject to non-commercial use and attribution. The licence does not extend to inter-school distribution, online posting, or commercial republication. Publishers build the licence in because the alternative — strict copyright — would make the resource pages unusable for the purpose they were written for.
What gets photocopied
Photocopiable formats cluster in a few task types: communication-gap pair-work cards, role-play prompts, board games, mingling activities, vocabulary card sets, progress tests, and review crosswords. The common feature is that the handout is consumable in use — learners write on it, cut it up, or take it home — so the original cannot be returned to stock.
Design constraints
Photocopiable materials are designed for monochrome reproduction. Heavy ink coverage reproduces poorly, fine-line illustrations degrade after a generation or two of copying, and tight layouts shift when scanned. Design that survives photocopy production uses high-contrast type, bordered task areas, and white space generous enough to absorb skewing. Formats that depend on colour (flag-recognition activities, visual-grammar cues coded by hue) break in monochrome.
Copyright limits
Fair-use and fair-dealing provisions in most jurisdictions cover small-scale educational copying separately from photocopiable licences, but the legal boundaries vary by country and are narrower than teachers often assume. Photocopying full coursebook units, copying whole workbooks instead of buying them, or systematically distributing copies beyond a single class generally falls outside both photocopiable licences and fair-use provisions.
Digital successors
Most publishers now release photocopiable resources as printable PDFs, often inside a teacher's portal alongside lesson plans and answer keys. The licence terms travel with the format: printable for classroom use, not redistributable online. Fully digital alternatives, where learners interact on screen rather than print, sidestep the photocopy question altogether.
References
- McGrath, I. (2002). Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching. Edinburgh University Press.
- Cunningsworth, A. (1995). Choosing Your Coursebook. Heinemann.
- McDonough, J., Shaw, C., & Masuhara, H. (2013). Materials and Methods in ELT: A Teacher's Guide (3rd ed.). Wiley-Blackwell.