[AdvantageEnglish]

I try to give alot of variety in my lessons... which removes the monotony and makes the lesson more interesting than the common chalk-and-talk-textbook lesson....

I often use TV commercials and public service announcements which can be found on sites like youtube, downloaded as Flash videos and converted to video files for playing on a DVD player or straight from the computer.

These are great for intermediate to advanced level students to discuss such matters as drugs, alcohol, smoking, drink driving, speeding, methods of advertising products, the way people are portrayed by the media - example: gender roles and stereotypes and many more topics... The clips are typically 30-60 seconds long, but the discussions can last a whole lesson if backed up with some well thought-out questions and pehaps a few interesting expressions and vocabulary for the students to use...

This type of lesson, I find, is alot more interesting than page to page in a texbook !

For a listening activity, I make cloze activities using the lyrics to songs.
(A cloze is a Fill-in-the-missing-words activity)
Play the song and students listen and fill in the blanks in the lyrics - on a worksheet that you've made and printed.

There's usually alot of vocab, idiomatic expressions, slang, phrasal verbs etc... to introduce to make the activity worthwhile and you can choose a more advanced song or a faster song for higher level students, easier or more straight forward song for beginners. For lower level students, provide all the possible words in a WORD-BOX at the top of the page.
For advanced students, annalyze the hidden meanings of more abstract songs - example: Hotel California, Bohemian Rapsody !

Adult students are generally studying at their own discretion - not forced by parents, obviously. So they obviously have enough motivation to have contacted you and enrolled in your classes in the first place. Now all you have to do is keep that motivation level high by offering interesting lessons with loads of variety... There's nothing wrong with using a textbook - it's a great way to make sure you teach topics and grammar points in a logical sequence. But going from page to page can start to become dull... Spicing your textbook up with these and other interesting activities should keep motivation high.