Designing Materials

I agree that students learn to speak in the second language by interacting with others. Communicative Language Teaching is based on real life situations that require communication and by using this method in our classes, students have the opportunity of communicate among them using their second language. I think that we as teachers (or me as a future one) should create a classroom environment where students have real life communication, authentic activities, and meaningful tasks that promote oral language.

In my personal experience, I have created and designed materials for the classes, and I found it very useful. You don’t need to be a genius to produce highly successful, dynamic lessons using authentic materials. You just have to think in your students, what they can do, what they like, how they think and what are their motivations for learning English. While it is true that creating or adapting materials consume lot of time and money it is also true that once you have done the work, you can reuse the materials over and over again with other groups, private students or again the following year, etc.

As an example I created a storytelling activity with a cartoon I found, and after adapting it for my students I conclude that working with attractive material improves and boosts the creative thinking in them. It also helps students express their ideas and to create the typical format of beginning, development, and ending, including the characters and the setting a story has to have. Working with attractive materials make students more active in the learning process and at the same time make their learning more meaningful and fun for them. So, we as teachers must find our students motivations in real life and to translate those motivations in creative materials, and students will love it.