Do it yourself!

Do you want your students to learn the language but sometimes you don’t know how to do it? Many times,  we (teachers) find ourselves facing the desire to change the old perspectives of teaching, but we don’t have enough time for finding, selecting, evaluating, adapting and making materials  to engage today’s students.It is true that designing your own materials could be time-consuming, but we should rather concentrate in the advantagesof doing so, and the rewards that come after that.

As we have mentioned in older posts, teachers may want to design their own materials for many reasons. Despite the fact that there is a huge market of materials (textbooks, Cds, videos, etc) available for teachers, some would prefer not to rely so much on them, as they would prefer to make their teaching more interesting and adapted to a specific group of students with their specific needs.

In this post we will analyze some guidelines for designing effective materials for teaching English that were presented by Major and Howard in their “Guidelines for Designing Effective English Language Teaching Materials” .

http://www.commonsensecampaign.org

• English language teaching materials should offer opportunities for integrated language use

As the authors stated, in many language teaching materials there is mainly a focus on productive or receptive skills. But by designing their own materials, teachers could “give learners opportunities to integrate all the language skills in an authentic manner”. Of course, at this point, technology will be as important as face to face education is in the learning process. A task needs to be very well designed so as to combine the four skills in an effective way.

• English language teaching materials should be authentic

We have already dealt with ideas about authenticity in older posts, when we analyzed the criteria for selecting a website. We shouldn’t trust everything that is on-line. Nonetheless, materials designers should try to find authentic but trustworthy material so students can hear, see and read native speakers in real/natural communication.

The tasks we give the students also have to be authentic, so they can connect what they learn to their life and the world outside the classroom when using it for everyday communication.

• English language teaching materials should be flexible

Teachers should design tasks in which students are free to choose the procedure to develop it. For instance, when given a task in which students have to present a topic, they could be given freedom to select which devices to use.

Maley (2003) admits diversity of content, roles and procedures for teachers and students and puts forward that flexibility is also possible in approach, level, methodology, logistics, technology, teaching style, ways to evaluate and expected outcomes. 

So as to avoid the stereotyped responses that students have towards English, teachers should create a state of expectancy in each lesson when providing them with innovative resources. There is no way of doing so by using the “one-size-fits-all” approach of commercial materials, so, always bear in mind: YOUR STUDENTS ARE UNIQUE!

http://www.innovationmanagement.se/