Samarkand state institute of foreign languages english faculty I course paper

1.2. Designing Effective English Teaching Materials
Teaching materials form an important part of most English teaching programmes. From textbooks, videotapes and pictures to the Internet, teachers rely heavily on a diverse range of materials to support their teaching and their students’ learning. However, despite the current rich array of English language teaching materials commercially available, many teachers continue to produce their own materials for classroom use. Indeed, most teachers spend considerable time finding, selecting, evaluating, adapting and making materials to use in their teaching. In this paper we synthesise a range of ideas from the literature on materials design. We consider why teachers might want to design their own teaching materials and look at some of the advantages and disadvantages. We examine six factors that teachers need to take into account when considering designing their own materials; and finally we present ten guidelines for designing effective English teaching materials.
In designing their own materials teachers can also make decisions about the most appropriate organising principle or focus for the materials and activities. And this can be changed over the course of the programme if necessary. Most coursebooks remain organised around grammar elements and the PPP (presentation, practice, production) model of teaching, often with an “unrelenting format” which can be “deeply unengaging” [5; 64]. By taking more control over materials production, teachers can choose from the range of possibilities, including topics, situations, notions, functions, skills etc, or a combination of these principles, as starting points to develop a variety of materials that focus on the developing needs of their particular group of learners.
Factors to Consider When Designing Materials
We turn now to consider six key factors that teachers need to take into account when embarking on the design of teaching materials for their learners. These relate to, and refer back to some of the advantages and disadvantages. Some will also be expanded further in the guidelines which follow.
The first and most important factor to be considered is the learners. If the point of teacher-created materials is relevance, interest, motivation and meeting specific individual needs, then clearly teachers must ensure they know their learners well. Any consideration of syllabus or materials design must begin with a needs analysis. This should reveal learning needs with regard to English language skills in listening, speaking, reading, writing, vocabulary knowledge and grammar; as well as individual student’s learning preferences. It is not just learning needs that are relevant to the teacher as materials designer, however. Equally important is knowledge about students’ experiences (life and educational), their first language and levels of literacy in it, their aspirations, their interests and their purposes for learning English.
The curriculum and the context are variables that will significantly impact on decisions about teaching materials. Many teachers are bound by a mandated curriculum defining the content, skills and values to be taught. Whether imposed at school or state level, a curriculum outlines the goals and objectives for the learners and the course of study. Whatever the curriculum, it is the teacher’s responsibility to ensure that the goals and objectives of the overarching curriculum are kept close at hand when designing materials [6; 32]. As noted earlier, the context in which the teaching and learning occurs will impact on the types of materials that may need to be designed. For example, a primary-level mainstream, English-speaking setting, with a set curriculum and access to native speakers may require materials that facilitate interaction about subject content, and develop cognitive academic language proficiency. However, refugee adults may need teaching materials that focus on meeting immediate survival needs and gaining employment.
The resources and facilities available to the teacher-designer are also mentioned above as an element of context. Clearly teachers must be realistic about what they can achieve in terms of materials design and production within the limitations of available resources and facilities. Access to resources such as computers (with or without Internet access), a video player and TV, radio, cassette recorder, CD player, photocopier, language lab., digital camera, whiteboard, OHP, scissors, cardboard, laminator etc will impact on decisions in materials design. Hadfield and Hadfield (2003) offer some useful suggestions for ‘resourceless’ teaching which address the impoverished reality of some teaching contexts.
Personal confidence and competence are factors that will determine an individual teacher’s willingness to embark on materials development. This will be influenced by the teacher’s level of teaching experience and his or her perceived creativity or artistic skills and overall understanding of the principles of materials. A less exciting, but nevertheless important factor to consider in designing materials is copyright compliance. Teachers need to be aware of the restrictions that copyright laws place on the copying of authentic materials, published materials and materials downloaded from the Internet for use in the classroom. This is particularly important when creating course materials that will be used by a large number of classes over time. Copyright law has implications when creating materials that include excerpts from published works. An example of this would be creating a worksheet that uses a picture or exercise from a commercial text, alongside teacher-created activities. While an idea cannot be copyright, the expression of the idea can be and teachers need to be mindful of this.
Time was discussed earlier as a disadvantage for teachers who wish to design their own materials. It is thus, important to consider ways to make this aspect manageable. Block (1991) suggests a number of ways in which teachers can lighten the load, including sharing materials with other teachers, working in a team to take turns to design and produce materials, and organising central storage so materials are available to everyone.
Most course books include the four skills – reading, writing, speaking, listening – as well as pronunciation. A good book caters for different learning styles through varied activities, whereas your lesson plans probably tend to play to your own strengths and learning style – it’s only natural. So for example, if you like learning visually, you teach most of your lessons that way too. Using a book helps you include activities that suit all types of learners.
✓ The course syllabus is clearly set out for you and the students.
✓ If each student has a book it reduces your preparation time including
photocopying.
✓ It’s easy for students to see their progress as they work their way through the book.
✓ Authors and publishers have experience in the field so you feel supported and guided.
✓ Course books often come as part of a set that includes extra resources, so they offer room for expansion and variety.
When you’re choosing a book for your students, keep a few points in mind:
✓ Books aren’t cheap, so find one that suits your students’ pockets.
✓ Consider the cultural suitability of the book. Will the class be able to identify with the images and written content? Is there anything which may seriously offend or upset your students?
Common teaching materials can include:
✓ Student’s book: The book the students use in class.
✓ Teacher’s book: This book usually contains the answers to exercises in the student’s book and fleshes out the lesson plan for each unit with background information and tips.
✓ CDs: Sometimes included with the student’s book but not always. They can be fairly costly, so check this out before you commit your students to the cost.
✓ Work book: To save photocopying, you can often get work books that
students use as homework.
✓ Resource book: This book for teachers contains extra, photocopiable activities.Many books tell you how many hours of study they provide. Compare this with the length of your course before you decide how much material you actually need.
Catering to a class of mixed ability
If one student is much better than the rest of the class, she may get bored with lessons using material she already knows. You need to think of ways to extend the exercises in the book to provide a greater challenge.
For the more advanced students, try these options:
✓ Provide a learners’ dictionary so that students can look up words in the course book and prepare to explain them to the rest of the class. This is an alternative to pre-teaching (teaching the meaning of new vocabulary just before students encounter it in the lesson materials) vocabulary yourself.
✓ While other students are still reading, set an extra activity for the
quicker students:
• Have them transform all the verbs into a different tense.
• Have them retell the story without using particular ‘taboo’ words.
These exercises stretch their grammar and vocabulary respectively.
For weaker students, you can:
✓ Supplement the book by offering extra information. Plan additional presentations on points that the students find difficult and prepare glossaries of the vocabulary in a particular lesson for easy reference.
✓ Make the activities easier than the ones in the book. For example, where the book has a fill-in-the-gap exercise, you can give the students a multiple choice option.
✓ Make greater use of the images as these are less threatening to the student than words. Ask easier questions about what is in a picture and get students to label it.
✓ Split up a unit to make the content more manageable and less stressful.
For both weak and strong students, include more competitions and games with the same language aims as the syllabus in the book. When the students work together in mixed ability groups they support each other and the group can establish its own pace, whereas exercises in a course book are less fluid.
Setting tasks
Sometimes students don’t engage with the material or feel that it’s not relevant to them. In this case, set students tasks based on the book. Get students role-playing characters in the book, and having debates about points made in the text. They can also read a passage aloud in the manner of a particular adverb (quickly, snobbishly and so on) or dictate short sections to each other to practise pronunciation.When you plan your lesson, include a warm-up activity and maybe a cooldown one too, which have nothing to do with the book. And don’t open the book until it’s absolutely necessary. Insist that students close the book during the stages of the lesson when it’s not needed so that they focus on what you’re saying, or so that they try hard to use their own words instead of reading [1; 120].
Making Use of Authentic Materials
Using text other than course books has a few drawbacks though, such as these:
✓ It’s hard to find materials just the right length for your lesson.
✓ Material designed for native speakers is often too difficult for learners in terms of grammar and vocabulary.
✓ The text may contain too much slang or irrelevant vocabulary.
✓ Students may become overwhelmed by the variety of accents and vocabulary in the English-speaking world.
✓ Authentic materials are so ‘of the moment’ that you need some knowledge of current affairs and culture to really appreciate them and they soon become out of date.
✓ It takes time to select, adapt and/or prepare them.
However, using authentic materials really motivates students because it gives them a glimpse of what they’ll be able to access in English when their language skills improve
Designing Your Own Materials
If you happen to be in a situation where there are few, if any, published materials, or if you’re just a creative soul, you can have a stab at designing your own materials to keep and re-use. I say re-use, because it’s easy to spend hours preparing the perfect lesson and then forget to file a copy away for another class, effectively loosing the benefit of your work.
✓ Use cards and laminating so that you won’t have to cut things up again next time.
✓ You don’t have to make one for each student. Group and pair work encourages speaking so just make enough to share.
✓ To get full use of your materials, build your whole lesson around the theme. If you’ve recorded a conversation that you want to use as a listening activity, ask the students to predict what the conversation is going to be about, compare their ideas, analyse the tapescript, imagine the characters who are speaking, describe them, extend the conversation themselves, role play it and so on.
✓ Separate visuals from exercises so that you can use the same visual image in many different ways.
✓ Keep your worksheets and re-use them but make little changes each time so that the examples are more personalised.
✓ Make sure that you present and lay out your material well. Even if your ideas are great, students are put off by anything dull, cluttered or unclear.
✓ Use famous names and brands in your examples as students are likely to use them in real life anyway.
✓ Make sure that your worksheet instructions unfold step by step. So,
don’t give out all the instructions at once. Give the students what they need to complete one stage at a time.
✓ If you design materials for a school you work in, you should agree beforehand on the future use of this work even after you leave the company.