Teaching materials are an important part of any teaching and learning process. Although there is a great amount of teaching material available on the Internet, books and magazines, some teachers still continue to produce their own material, spending time finding, selecting, evaluating and making material for classroom use.
In their article, Jocelyn Howard and Jae Major states the advantages of teacher-designed material that may be the reasons why teachers decide to produce them. Some of the advantages are:
Contextualisation: designing and adapting their material enables teachers to take into account their particular learning environment and to overcome the lack of "fit" of the coursebook.
Individual needs: they can be responsive to the heterogeneity in the classroom. They provide the opportunity to select texts and activities at the right level for particular learners, to ensure appropriate challenges and levels of success. What's more, teachers can take into account the learners' cultures, learning needs and their experiences.
Personalization: tapping into the interests and taking account of learning styles of students is likely to increase motivation and engagement in learning.
Timeliness: teacher-designed material can respond to local and international up-to-date events, relevant and high interest topics and tasks.
They also suggest some factors that teacher should consider when designing material, such as the learners, curriculum and the context, resources and facilities, personal confidence and competence and time. These factors are closely related to the advantages described above.
In my last post I talked about my practices, and that I had to prepare a didactic unit that had to "fit" with the group of learners. For this I had to evaluate and reflect upon all the factors that Howard and Major describe, and I have to admit it was a hard work to do! But I think it is the best way, especially to motivate students to learn the language, since many of them can't see the purpose of learning English and have a really negative attitude towards it.
