Materials: Adopting? Adapting? Designing? Help!!

All along my masters course of Materials’ Design my classmates, professor and I have analyzed different textbooks and other materials used for English teaching in different programs and directed to different kinds of population too; nevertheless, we still argue which of three strategies is the best; adopting, adapting or design your own materials. Last class we had the opportunity to share with Mr. Francisco Vargas which is the representative of Cambridge University Press, a very well known university and publisher since the 1900’s, and who gave us some principles when choosing such as important decision of selecting the materials we will use on our classrooms.
I have come out with my own perception and I have analyzed that the three of them have their advantages and disadvantages, but I feel more inclined to use only two of the three strategies: adapting and designing. In regards to adapting materials, I use this technique since I consider that is important that we use materials which have been designed by experts and researchers of the field who know about the topic. Besides, at my workplaces, the syllabuses were designed according to a book, so this is the corpus and the guide of the topics to be developed along the program. But on the other side, as we teachers know, textbooks are standard and they do not satisfy completely our students’ needs; there is when it comes the need of adapt the activities and topics that those books offer to our goals, looking for different strategies of using these activities based on what we want our students to reach.
About designing our own materials, I am the supporter number one since I love designing my own materials according to a specific group, types of learning, level of performance and objectives to reach. Our own materials completely seek to please our students’ necessities and they are completely original and authentic. But designing materials is time consuming and unfortunately many teachers do not have the economic support or possibilities to create their tools.
So, I believe that each teacher should have judgment and have as well a clear idea of what they want to do in their classes. If we really know our objectives, we will have the enough knowledge and discernment to choose appropriately our materials and make the difference in our classrooms.

Be aware with your choice teachers!!

The idea of evaluating textbooks is not only for selecting which materials we as teachers like or dislike, but this decision-making process should be seen as a process where we need to discover if the materials we have in our hands are suitable for our students or not. Hutchinson (1987) says
“Materials evaluation can and should be a two-way process which enables teachers not just to select a textbook, but also to develop their awareness of their own teaching/learning situation”(2).
Also, as he expresses, evaluation should be seen as a process of matching where you need to find a link between the needs, the materials and the overall teaching/learning situation. Sometimes, teachers only select materials because they look pretty, full of colors, or they may be fun for the students; however, but at the end learners are not able to perform anything . As English instructor, there should be five important principles when we select materials; first, the content of the material and the relationship among what is being studied in class. Second, the objective of such material; how meaningful it is and if they students are really going to accomplish something when we finish the activity. The third principle is if the material is realistic and suitable for them to apply in real life situations; the fourth principle is the way this material is designed. Materials cannot be too crowded, with different fonts, easy to follow and understand and finally, the last principle is that they should cause a positive effect on the students at the time they are doing the activity.
By the reason of this, I prefer to design and adapt the materials I have because I know that they will fulfill certain objectives and they are going to be worthy although they mean work for me; but seeing my students working and reaching goals and be able to perform in the target language with materials I designed is more grateful than anything else. I consider that we teachers always have the right too chose, as you decide if you want to be a good teacher you can decide which materials you can use in your classrooms in many fields such as methodological, technological, style and approach .

Are class materials easy to design?

When acquiring a language, we instructors tend to take for granted that by using only a coursebook in our classroom or applying random materials in class that only satisfy us; the foreign language students will achieve a successful learning. However, this wrong conception has lead to the failure not only of our students’ outcomes, but also of us in a professional field as instructors of English as foreign language. The fact of designing materials does not only imply cutting and pasting papers or using colors; on the contrary, this is a task which requires time, knowledge, and the analysis of our students’ needs in our classroom. Developing materials in such a way provide with a possibility to communicate and use the language in real life contexts.

According to Brian Tomlinson, one of the most common pitfalls we fall into when designing materials is that sometimes they lack of coherence (13). In other cases, most of the materials do not show any use of language structures or a specific content; they have been just made with the purpose of entertaining students but this materials do not challenge them at all to practice the language. Indeed, very well designed materials, in this case coursebooks, must access content and structures to be developed in a coherent and organized way besides having an adequate layout that catch the learners’ attention. Regarding other materials such as games, flashcards and much more, they must cause a positive impact on the learners’ attitude and expose them in authentic use and real life situations. Our materials should increase learners’ confidence, motivation and interest because if they are not well designed, those materials can cause a negative backwash on our students.

In brief, although in the world there are great materials that we can adopt or adapt, we teachers can not just sit and fall into a satisfactory level that all we have bought or created is good enough. But we should go into the design, and mostly, improvement of our materials; make them meaningful so that they can offer our students a better chance of satisfaction and success in their learning process.