Designing Effective English Language Teaching Materials

Hi there! In this blog entry I would like to comment upon how to design effective English language teaching materials. Frequently, we ask ourselves why is it that we should design our own materials and we hesitate about whether it would be a good idea or not. For this reason, I would like to share with you an informative articled “Guidelines forDesigning Effective English Language Teaching Materials,” written by Jocelyn Howard and Jae Major (2005). This author states some advantages and disadvantages of designing our own materials, the factors that we should bear in mind when designing materials, and, finally, some guidelines for designing effective materials.

As regards the advantages, they provided the following ones:

-Contextualization: commercialised coursebooks and material are not designed for a specific group of students, they aim at a general audience and, consequently, they are not always suitable for the group we are teaching at. Therefore, many teachers decide to adapt or to create their own materials so as to make up for that lack of “fitting.”

-Resources available: we should take into consideration the resources we can make use of. In some teaching contexts we could have access to a vast array of resources whereas in some others we may not have even a board and a piece of chalk. Furthermore, there are schools in which there are no coursebooks or other already designed materials. Therefore, we should design our own. Apart from that, commercialised books are rather expensive and they could be unaffordable for the learners, the school or both.

-Individual Needs: no one can understand students´ needs better than their teacher. The authors of coursebooks have in mind a hypothetical audience when designing activities, but it is the teacher who knows her students, their needs, mother tongue, interests, strengthens and weaknesses. That´s why, many teachers choose to adapt materials so as to make them more suitable. Aside from that, sometimes the coursebooks present the topics in a certain way – almost always from a structuralist perspective – and the teacher may consider that the contents are valuable but not the way in which they are organised and approached. Consequently, teachers could adapt the materials in a way that suits both her view of language and her view of language learning.

-Personalization: teacher-produced materials are a way of adding a personal touch to our teaching. We do so by taking into account our students´ needs, interests, level of language proficiency, their learning styles, and multiple intelligences. Students will feel much more  motivated and engaged. Besides, they do appreciate our efforts!

Disadvantages:

-Organization: whereas coursebooks tend to be organised following a certain pattern, which tend to give both teachers and students security, some “home-made” materials may be incoherent and lacking a unifying theme

-Quality: Sometimes teacher-made materials may contain errors. Moreover, they could lack durability and be unclear as regards their organization and print. 

-Time: you may be highly enthusiastic about designing your own materials but sometimes, especially if you are a “taxi” teacher (a teacher who works in many schools), you don’t have much time to do so.

Factors we should bear in mind when designing materials:

-Learners: this is the most important factor to be considered. We should design our materials according to our students´ s needs, interests, motivation, specific individual needs, and their purposes for learning English.

-Curriculum and context: both of them will influence our choices when designing materials since “a curriculum outlines the goals and objectives for the learners and the course of study” (Howard, 2005). Nevertheless, it is our responsibility to ensure that those goals and course objectives stated on the curriculum are achieved.

-Resources and Facilities: when designing materials, we should think about the resources available in the context we are teaching. We should be realistic!

-Personal confidence and competence: whether we are willing to run the risk of designing materials or not will very much depend on our self-confidence and competence. Many teachers decide to rely  on coursebooks completely since they do not believe themselves to be capable of undergoing this task of producing materials. Generally, what teachers tend to do is to add activities, leave some aside, replace or adapt them, or to change their organisational structures.

-Copyright compliance: we should be aware of the lawful restrictions when directly copying authentic and published materials, and materials downloaded from the Internet.

-Time

Guidelines:

1-English language teaching material should be contextualised: Materials should be contextualised to the curriculum they are intended to address, to the students´ realities, needs, interests, experiences, reality, mother tongue and culture, and to meaningful and purposeful topics and themes.

2-Materials should stimulate interaction and be generative in terms of language: language should be used for real and purposeful communication. Language-teaching materials should aim at fulfilling this communicative purpose. In real communication we need to have something to communicate to someone with an intention.

3-English language teaching materials should encourage learners to develop learning skills and strategies: It is important that language teaching materials help students to learn how to learn not only within the classroom but also outside the classroom, fostering their autonomy and self-assessment.

4-English language teaching material should allow for a focus on form as well as function: Form is just one of the sub-systems of this system called “Language.” Consequently, we cannot focus only on one aspect. Form goes hand in hand with Function, they are intrinsically interrelated. Hence, one cannot be separated from the other.

5- English language teaching material should offer opportunities for integrated language use: commercialised materials tend to focus just on one skill at the time. Therefore, designing our own materials is an excellent opportunity to integrate the four skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing.

6- English language teaching material should be authentic: they should be authentic not only in terms of the texts presented (written, spoken and visual ones) but also in terms of the tasks they should carry out. 

7- English language teaching material should link to each other to develop a progression of skills, understandings and language items: all the tasks and activities designed should be interrelated and organised following a specific pattern.

8-English language teaching material should be attractive: teacher-produced materials should be attractive as regards physical appearance, user-friendliness, durability and ability to be reproduced.

9- English language teaching material should have appropriate instructions: instructions should be clear, simple, short, to the point and one at the time.

10- English language teaching material should be flexible: These materials should be flexible in terms of content. They should offer a wide range of possibilities from which students can choose from.

After having read this article for the first time, I immediately considered it to be a must-read piece of writing as it is clear, brief and to the point. Many times we decide to design materials but we need some guidelines in order to create appropriate, practical and suitable tasks for the particular group of students we are working with.

All in all, before designing our own materials, we should weigh up its pros and cons, keeping in mind some factors, guidelines and, above all, always maintaining the focus on our objectives and  our students.

Finally, just a reminder:

Never forget your aims!!!!!!!!