Here is my essay for the course.

1. Designing your own materials can definitely help you turn into a highly professional
teacher and your students to turn into successful learners.
In the twenty-first century, teacher´s job seems to have become a lot easier due to the fact
that we are surrounded by tools that facilitate teaching process a lot. Nevertheless, we often
turn to designing our own materials. I personally do that almost for every class – whether it
is a PPT presentation, some conversation cards or a video. Then, the question comes
whether our time is worth being spent on something that probably already exists. In my
opinion, it is definitely worth it, because creating our own materials makes us more
thoughtful and aware of what we teach, helps us become better at designing, and it helps
our students grow as learners.
First of all, whenever we design materials, we look at our lessons with a goal in mind, and
having lesson goals clear ensures productive teaching process. If we decide to create
something of our own, that is because we understand what final product we want to see our
students produce. Moreover, we clearly understand what grammar or vocabulary our
students will need to work with that material, and this in turn can help us build our lesson in
a logical way – towards the objective that we have in mind. I totally agree with Brown
(1994) when he says that self-made materials “represent … effective teaching aids.” (p.193)
Since we are the ones teaching a class, we know exactly what we want and thus creating
materials can become the most effective decision that we make.
Second, every time we implement materials created by us, we become better and better at
designing. That happens as a consequence of constant reflection: Were the materials
appropriate for the level? Were they challenging enough? Were they generative? Did they
meet our students´ likes and needs? If we are critical enough, we are able to detect whether
something we created worked or not, and if it did not, we can try to figure out the reason.
This allows our minds to become trained and to be able to see at once how it is better to
approach this or that activity. By asking the above mentioned questions, we can turn into
true experts at designing ELT materials.
In addition to bringing benefits to us as teachers, designing materials can improve our
students´ learning process, too. First, it happens because very often textbooks do not bring

2. enough practical exercises, and as a result a new topic might not be well understood by our
students. However, if we decide to complement a textbook by materials of our own, it will
let our learners have either more input or output – both of which will eventually lead to a
better result. Apart from that, it can help us engage students into activities by designing
materials that would match their context and their personalities. For instance, if I know that
I am teaching a topic of “Movies” and I am teaching it to a group of professionals, then I
may decide to look for famous movie quotes and have my students do a gap-fill activity and
after that - a discussion. While if I am teaching that topic to a group of teenagers, I would
rather look for soundtracks and create a video quiz using those soundtracks to have them
identify the movie and write its summary. In other words, when designing materials, I will
take into account that teenagers love media activities while adults prefer something more
thoughtful. I believe that being able to create something that responds students´ needs can
also improve our classes.
As a conclusion, there are many advantages that should convince teachers that designing
their own materials is a good idea. Of course, there is also a great deal of things we should
remember about when creating something of our own. For example, we must remember
that our materials cannot “contain errors, be poorly constructed, lack clarity in layout and
print and lack durability”. (Howard & Major) Otherwise, their mere appearance might repel
students´ interest. And of course, there is always the problem of time – creating materials
can result being quite time-consuming. But despite all of the possible complications,
designing one´s own materials can bring a lot of benefits into your classroom helping you
give a more interesting class and helping your students to have a more meaningful
experience.
References
Howard, J., Major, J. Guidelines for designing effective English language teaching
materials. Retrieved from
http://www.paaljapan.org/resources/proceedings/PAAL9/pdf/Howard.pdf
Brown, H. Douglas (1994) Teaching by Principles an Interactive Approach to Language
Pedagogy. San Francisco State University: Prentice Hall.