Material design for ELT and TEFL in the Colombian educational context: a

languages student’s perspective

During the “Methods and Approaches” course there was provided a detailed
explanation about the different teaching and learning ways to learn a language (in
our case English). Therefore, there are diversity of topics related with pedagogy for
teaching a language (and its educational achievements) those were very important
to envision my future experience as a languages teacher. I also should add that
among the diversity of texts read during the course. There were presented some
suggestions about the different ways to manage the educational contents in the
classroom and how to adapt them depending on the context.

During the development of the course it was explained a topic called Adapting
teaching materials, with the purpose of introduce the diverse ways to use a content
for teaching a language. According to that, those ways for using materials are
reflected in the attitudes of the teacher at the time of taking advantage of those
contents offered by the MEN, schools and virtual media:

1. Consume material: usage of materials as textbooks and virtual resources

without the need of adjust it for the teaching needs
2. Material adaptation: the use of existent teaching materials for creating new
material or to adjust an existent material in a specific context
3. Material design: as a teacher create his/her own useful material according
to the learning needs of the students

Thus, this topic provides an analysis about how to manage in a smart way the
teaching resources to apply during a class

Furthermore the background of the design or the material adaptation requires

creativity, critical thinking and pedagogical reading at the moment to design
materials following what they proposed in their lesson plan and teaching activities
that will improve the languages learning. Dat Bhao throughout the text
Improvements in today´s ELT materials development exposes and justifies the
needs for adapting standard materials offered by the countries from the Inner circle
(in this case UK) but they don’t take into account the social aspects (context), the
methodologies (teaching contents and methodologies for teaching languages) and
the motivation aspects (reasons to learn a language) following the needs of the
environment.

Nevertheless, textbooks and standard teaching materials are built for an specific
group. Then teachers should have criteria to choose materials for adapting them to
the environment: contextualized information, clarity of contents, methods and
approaches for teaching and specific learning proposes. Bhao (2016) exposes that
ELT materials should be linked to teaching strategies. Those materials sould be
applied according to the student’s learning needs.In adittion, the materials offer
new posibilities to create new materials that relate the student with the educational
environment.

As a consequence, languages teaching in Colombia requires of the motivation and

strategies of the teacher at the moment to select and creation of learning materials.
Hence the teacher need to dispose of his/her time and creativity to develop
authentic materials. Throughout the constantly discovering of material (virtual or
physic) and use them in an efficient, effective and flexible way in the school
environment. As a student of teaching languages from my opinion I think that the
success of a teacher depends on the smart and responsible use of the resources
he/she has, such as textbooks, magazines and digital texts that will be helpful to
create learning useful materials adapted to the student’s learning needs.

Benefits of adapting materials

The different opinions given during the course show to us some perspectives about
how to choose textbooks, make real changes of the resources to transmit the
contents and discover different contents that support the learning purposes
proposed by the institutional curriculum.

My classmates write 6 reasons to adapt materials:

1. Failure of the textbooks

2. The material it is not adapted to the student’s learning needs
3. Variety of contens
4. Generate new assesment ways
5. Creative uses of the material by teacher looking for the benefits at the time
of present an activity
6. Flexibility of contents

After taking notes from the course, read some texts about material adaptation and
dialogue with some languages teachers during the semester. I thought in some
other reasons for adapting material

From my point of view those are the advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

1. Generate motivation in the students to meet the structure of an L2

2. Adapt it according to the methods and approaches which the teacher will
work with.
3. Choose the available resources to create teaching strategies based on the
context
4. Choose in a detailed way the physic and digital resources to produce new
knowledge
Disadvantages
1. Lack of time to choose materials
2. Subjectivity of the teacher at the time to teach an specific topic