To design or not to design our own material?

When reflecting about teaching, we can assert that teachers play many different roles in the classroom, such as:

But apart from them, we want to make emphasis on the role of the teacher as a material designer. Teaching materials are an essential resource to assist and support students’ learning. Among those materials we can find the coursebook, which may have some disadvantages, for example that:

-          - They are not contextualized since they are produced for the worldwide EFL market. That is to say, they are not addressed to a specific group of learners.

-           - They do not take into account the individual needs of the students.

Those disadvantages can be a point of departure for us (teachers) to design our own material, since it can act as a complement for addressing the needs of a specific group of  students and their particular learning styles in a particular context.

We can design activities and materials that interest the students and encourage them to be involved in the lesson and to use the language meaningfully. If we design our own material, we will also take into account the age and level of our students.

In designing our own materials, we are autonomous and creative .

However, designing material is not as easy as it sounds. We  need to be careful with the activities designed are neither too easy nor too difficult. Moreover we need to spend a lot of time preparing all the material needed, which can be really demanding if it is the first time  we do it. It is important that teachers have the ability to re-use certain material, taking into account that certain things can be adapted to a specific group.

A useful alternative if we do not have the necessary time to create our own material is adapting the coursebook, using it as a starting point and then using extra material or activities to guide the students or to contextualize things that are not.

To sum up, we could say that designing our own material has both advantages and disadvantages: it can be appropriate for a particular group of students and include interesting and motivating topics, but it takes a lot of time to prepare it and the quality is not the same as the one of a coursebook.

Resources:
- Howard, J and Major, (n.d) - Guidelines for Designing Effective English Language Teaching Materials