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.