MATERIALS AND RESOURCES DESIGNED
TO ADULTS IN AN EFL

It is an undeniable fact that teaching materials form an important part of any teaching program. For English teachers, there is a quite rich amount of English language teaching material commercially available these days which suit all programs. However, we teachers continue searching for ways to support our work and we tend to spend a considerable amount of time on finding, selecting, adapting and making material to use in the classroom.

Why do teachers continue this complex undertaking? Simply because designing materials, although time-consuming, has advantages that outnumber the disadvantages. For instance; Bock (2013) advocates three main advantages for producing own material. The first one is contextualization. The benefit of having contextualized material is that learners perceive there is more meaning in what they are learning; therefore it is much more motivating for them. The second advantage is timeliness. Material produced by the teachers could include texts that be actualized, thus, students will be more interested in learning a second language in an actual context and, the last advantage is the personalization, also called “personal touch” which means that students appreciate material which is “home-made” because they feel that the teacher is taking into account their interests and learning styles.

In order to design our “kit” we have taken into account the three previous reasons (contextualization, timeless and our “personal touch”)

Contextualization: According to Donough and Shaw (1993) in order to contextualize, we as teachers have to keep in mind the learners characteristics and the setting.

Learners’ characteristics: Our material has been built for a group of Colombian students whose age may vary from 18 to 30 years, and whose first language is Spanish. A placement test has