The Language Teaching  Materials module was one of the most demanding and challenging courses I have ever taken, due to the sheer amount of knowledge and workload. Still, the course offered a great chance for me and other classmates to consolidate our understanding of English teaching and to put everything into practice, no matter how minimal it seemed. In this final post, I will reflect on my journey through the TE714 course and how it has broadened my perceptions of language teaching materials.

Looking back at my first post, I was wondering about the true value of  “creativity” and “authenticity” and how “adaptation” can be applied in the material design process. However, at that point, those concepts were only discussed in isolation. I have now realised that multiple processes are involved in making just a small piece of teaching material – the teacher can adapt an original text to suit the needs of students while keeping its authenticity, at the same time showing his or her creativity through the use of visuals and technology. Furthermore, by taking into account the fact that material design is an on-going process, there are various stages that the teacher will have to go through, including receiving feedback and revising, to create a final product that is worth using and meeting all the requirements.

Nonetheless, while I value “creativity” and “authenticity” in teaching materials, I now realise that there are so much more teachers need to consider while creating materials and each teacher might have his or her own priorities. Thus, it is important to establish a list of material design principles so that when teachers have to work together to create lessons, they will have a foundation to rely on. Otherwise, from my experience, the material evaluation and revision process could take forever due to unresolved arguments. After what my classmates and I have done on the worksheets during the course, I now believe that teachers could collaborate to produce more effective materials and form a healthy working environment.

Apart from the points above, the use of technology in the language classroom was also what I was looking forward to in this module. After doing some research on this topic, I think that in the future I will make use of different frameworks for using technology in the classroom so that the effectiveness of each device or application can be measured more accurately. Then, based on an analysis of those technologies, I will choose the most appropriate way to introduce them in the classroom through new teaching materials. However, technologies seem to come hand in hand with the tasks embedded in the learning materials – if the given tasks are not suitable, the lesson will likely fail to achieve its objective no matter how impressive and effective the technology is, and vice versa. Therefore, I will need to spend more time exploring the use of different task types, especially with writing tasks because this is my main interest.

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One an unrelated note, I mentioned at the end of my first post the question of whether a piece of material that is “fundamentally wrong” could be used to create a successful lesson. Reflecting on my new understanding of materials, I believe that materials could only be “right” or “wrong” if they are static and unchanged. However, as teaching materials can be flexible and there is always room for improvement, there is no point in keeping the “right-or-wrong” mindset. It would be better if we spend time thinking how the materials could be done more effectively. As strange and bizarre as the rest of my blog, this discussion reminds me of a quote from one of my most favourite artists:

She said that if she were to make the perfect song and only one song, she would change it every day. Similarly, if I were to have only one piece of material, I would adapt and supplement it every time I have a lesson to teach.

I hope this pseudo-food blog has somewhat satisfied your appetite and it made sense to you somehow.

Why are we doing what we do anyway? What is the meaning of all this?

I don’t know.