Essay for eportfolio
- 1. Designing your own materials can definitely help you turn into a highly professional teacher and your students to turn into successful learners. In the twenty-first century, teacher´s job seems to have become a lot easier due to the fact that we are surrounded by tools that facilitate teaching process a lot. Nevertheless, we often turn to designing our own materials. I personally do that almost for every class – whether it is a PPT presentation, some conversation cards or a video. Then, the question comes whether our time is worth being spent on something that probably already exists. In my opinion, it is definitely worth it, because creating our own materials makes us more thoughtful and aware of what we teach, helps us become better at designing, and it helps our students grow as learners. First of all, whenever we design materials, we look at our lessons with a goal in mind, and having lesson goals clear ensures productive teaching process. If we decide to create something of our own, that is because we understand what final product we want to see our students produce. Moreover, we clearly understand what grammar or vocabulary our students will need to work with that material, and this in turn can help us build our lesson in a logical way – towards the objective that we have in mind. I totally agree with Brown (1994) when he says that self-made materials “represent … effective teaching aids.” (p.193) Since we are the ones teaching a class, we know exactly what we want and thus creating materials can become the most effective decision that we make. Second, every time we implement materials created by us, we become better and better at designing. That happens as a consequence of constant reflection: Were the materials appropriate for the level? Were they challenging enough? Were they generative? Did they meet our students´ likes and needs? If we are critical enough, we are able to detect whether something we created worked or not, and if it did not, we can try to figure out the reason. This allows our minds to become trained and to be able to see at once how it is better to approach this or that activity. By asking the above mentioned questions, we can turn into true experts at designing ELT materials. In addition to bringing benefits to us as teachers, designing materials can improve our students´ learning process, too. First, it happens because very often textbooks do not bring
- 2. enough practical exercises, and as a result a new topic might not be well understood by our students. However, if we decide to complement a textbook by materials of our own, it will let our learners have either more input or output – both of which will eventually lead to a better result. Apart from that, it can help us engage students into activities by designing materials that would match their context and their personalities. For instance, if I know that I am teaching a topic of “Movies” and I am teaching it to a group of professionals, then I may decide to look for famous movie quotes and have my students do a gap-fill activity and after that - a discussion. While if I am teaching that topic to a group of teenagers, I would rather look for soundtracks and create a video quiz using those soundtracks to have them identify the movie and write its summary. In other words, when designing materials, I will take into account that teenagers love media activities while adults prefer something more thoughtful. I believe that being able to create something that responds students´ needs can also improve our classes. As a conclusion, there are many advantages that should convince teachers that designing their own materials is a good idea. Of course, there is also a great deal of things we should remember about when creating something of our own. For example, we must remember that our materials cannot “contain errors, be poorly constructed, lack clarity in layout and print and lack durability”. (Howard & Major) Otherwise, their mere appearance might repel students´ interest. And of course, there is always the problem of time – creating materials can result being quite time-consuming. But despite all of the possible complications, designing one´s own materials can bring a lot of benefits into your classroom helping you give a more interesting class and helping your students to have a more meaningful experience. References Howard, J., Major, J. Guidelines for designing effective English language teaching materials. Retrieved from http://www.paaljapan.org/resources/proceedings/PAAL9/pdf/Howard.pdf Brown, H. Douglas (1994) Teaching by Principles an Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. San Francisco State University: Prentice Hall.