Guideliness for Designing Effective English Language Teaching Materials.

Hello everybody! I found this mind map about the text by Howard and Major that we read in class (click here to see it in full size). 

I would like to highlight the most important factor to consider when designing materials - the learner. Coursebooks or ready-to-print material that we can find on the Internet may be useful, but we must bear in mind that each of our groups and, even more, each of our students, have its own distinctiveness. 

Creating new material or adapting the one we have to our learners' needs can help us to highlight aspects that coursebooks -created by people from other culture- may not consider important. Most of the times English coursebooks are created by native speakers and sold to teachers and students from different cultural backgrounds. By adapting them, we can design more accurate material which takes into account our learners' first language and culture. In that way, we will be teaching our students not only another language-culture but also making them reflect about their own.

I consider it utterly important for us to observe and analyse our learners' particularities and interests so as to design materials which are relevant and motivating for them. We need to acknowledge the fact that each group of students is different to the others and, even though we can re-use some material, we should pay attention to the differences between learners so as to adapt what we have created, tailoring the material and making it more profitable.

I suggest you to read Kumaravadivelu's 'Understanding Language Teaching' to see the relevance of recognizing learner's particularities.