Teachers as material designers.

Nowadays, teachers play many different roles in the classroom. They can be: learning facilitators, planners, motivators, prompters, assessors, tutors, technologist, and the most significant one for us, teachers as materials designers. According to Tomlinson Brian (2011), materials are anything teachers use to help students learn. 

Teachers try to use different kind of materials in order to make their students’ learning more interesting and also to support their own teaching in their lessons. 

Some teachers resort to books or activities already designed, while others decide to produce their own materials. This is mainly because they want to contextualize the activities taking into account their students’ needs, the context in which they live, the type of activities they like and the level they have.  

As we read in “Guidelines for designing effective English languageteaching materials” by Howard and Major (2005), there are many factors that teachers have to bear in mind when producing their own materials: 

1.       The learners. 

2.       The curriculum and the context. 

3.       The resources and facilities. 

4.       Personal confidence and competence. 

5.       Copyright compliance. 

6.       Time.

It is really important that teachers take into consideration all of them in order to create remarkable materials.

We, as future teachers, think that it is essential to design our own material, bearing in mind the learner as the center of our plans. In that way, we are going to be certain that they will learn appropriately. What is more, an important key factor to assure learning is contextualization; it would be very useful to adapt our materials to the specific group we will work with. Not only is it important to use the commercially produced materials, but also be able to construct our own teaching material. 



References:
- Tomlinson, Brian (2011). Material development in Language Teaching (2nd Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.