Why should I consider material designing as an option?

No matter where you live, or the level of English you are teaching at, we are sure you have said or heard someone say:  “My students cannot follow the book that we use in class”, “The activities that are in it are dull and boring”, “The content and topics do not fit my students’ interests and context”.  The major reasons for this incoherence in the relation content-students seem to lay in the fact that coursebooks are commercial materials. This means that the designers and publishing houses in charge of producing coursebooks aim at a general public with the purpose of addressing the majority of the EFL market. In other words, commercial materials like coursebooks “are necessarily generic and not aimed at any specific group of learners or any particular cultural or educational context.” (Howard & Major, 2005:101) These characteristics led teachers around the world to design their own materials so as to contextualise the contents and activities.

           There may be plenty of reasons why teachers decide to design their own teaching material. For example, teachers and students might not have the amount of money that is required to purchase commercial coursebooks. The coursebook may not fit the students’ interests or way and pace of learning. Another relevantaspect that is entailed in the decision of choosing either pre-designed material or personalised material is the theories of learning and teaching we base our practices on. This is crucial for our lessons to be coherent and logically organised.

          It is important to make clear that we do not assume material designing as an easy task that all teachers must involve themselves in. We are aware of the difficulties and amount of time that the task of designing carries. Wealso need to be aware that the outcome we must expect will not have the same ‘professional’ appearance as commercially produced materials. Here, different technological tools will aid us in the production of attractive and useful materials. Moreover, some other materials require handicraft abilities on the part of the teacher. We have to be aware of our capabilities, skills, and, also our weak points.

        As the teacher’s task is to help students to learn the language, we have to provide the materials that will help us to achieve that aim. It is in our power, as long as the educational context is flexible, to choose whether a commercially produced material or a more personalised self-designed material is more appropriate in a specific occasion. Do not forget that it is our task, and no one else’s, to choose what to teach and how to teach it, providing that we have clear our teaching goals.

Resources

Howard, J. and Major, J. (2005) Guidelines for designing effective English language teaching materials. Seoul, South Korea: PAAL9, Oct 2004. In Proceedings of the 9th Conference of Pan-Pacific Association of Applied Linguistics: 101-109.
http://www.paaljapan.org/resources/proceedings/PAAL9/pdf/Howard.pdf. (Conference Contribution - Published)