How valuable is it to design and create your own material?

As future teachers of English as Foreign Language (EFL), it is essential to consider the students' context when designing materials. In this way, we make sure that the materials are relevant and meaningful for learners. In addition to this, there are other important factors to bear in mind apart from contextualisation:

Retrived from
 http://www.anglistikdidaktikwiki.uni-jena.de/images/4/4b/Materials.jpg

• The material should attend to learners’ individual needs.

• The material should be flexible enough to be recycled.

• The layout should be attractive.

• The instruction should be simple and clear.

• The content should respond to the curriculum and at the same time, be organised and up-dated.

Although it may seem a difficult and time consuming task, we highly recommend that you follow these tips since the reward makes the effort worth.

This is just a brief summary of Howard and Major’s (2005) article called "Guidelines for Designing Effective English Language Teaching Materials."

Click here to have access to the complete article.