Teacher Design Materials or Coursebooks?


An important factor present in most English teaching programs is the creation of teaching materials. At the moment of teaching, we need to reflect on whether to work with a coursebook or teacher-design materials. Here we will examine one advantage and disadvantage that might help you to decide when to use LT (Language Teaching) materials.

According to Block (1991), contextualization is one of the most important advantages of teacher-produced materials. Compared to commercial materials, teaching materials provide learners with the necessary tools and content to maximize students’ learning. In contrast to coursebooks which are ‘Globally designed’, designing or adapting teacher materials enables ELT (English Language Teaching) to support their students’ needs and ‘to take into account their particular learning environment’ (Howard & Major, 2008: ).

For instance, I had to teach the pronouns ‘his’ and ‘her’ to a small group of young learners. The coursebook we use provided a grammar box and activities that consisted mainly of working with characters from the coursebook (His name’s Harry/Her name’s Beth). The activity was completely decontextualized from the learner's experiences and realities. So, in order to engage students in the process of learning, I designed a worksheet with pictures taken from a TV show they well know, ‘Spongebob’. In this way, students participated actively in the activities because it related to their background knowledge and experience in real life. Below you will find a picture quotes of other authors about contextualization.


According to Howard & Major, a key factor that might inhibit teachers from designing their own materials is time. We need to acknowledge that if we choose to use our own design material, this means finding, selecting, evaluating, adapting and making materials… (Howard & Major, 2008) to use in our lessons. This process is demanding and time-consuming, no matter how passionate and positive we are about the advantages of using LT materials. I believe that ELT would profit from LT materials if used in small courses. Think about designing or adapting materials for 25 students in each course you teach for every lesson. The number of materials to produce and the time to do it are excessive.
The following picture shows most teachers devote their time to correct homework, plan lessons, attend meetings, among other activities.


To conclude, teacher-design materials could be beneficial when used consciously and reflecting on the number of learners we had to teach, as well as the time available to do it.

References:

 Howard, J. & Major, J. (2008). Guidelines for Designing Effective English Language Teaching Materials. The Tesolanz Journal.

 Block, D. (1991). Some Thoughts on DIY Materials Design. ELT Journal, 45 (3), 211-217.

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