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This essay will examine creating materials for teaching English and how the teacher should create it successfully. Nowadays, teachers have a lot of resources for learning, a lot of materials for any levels and ages of the students. The materials can be authentic and non authentic. According to Tesolcourse.com, “Non authentic material refers to anything that has been designed specifically to aid the teaching process such as worksheets, textbooks, and instructional CD’s or DVD’S. Authentic material refers to items that have not been designed or adapted for use in an English language classroom such as magazines, newspapers, video clips and song lyric”. Published materials are helpful instruments for teachers as they provide lesson materials depending on the student’s level and activities fully arrange to provide best practice for students. However, most teachers feel the need to prepare own materials for their classes at some time. The teacher has many resources to create it but the teacher should follow some rules to make it more helpful for the students. Firstly, the teacher should understand what the purpose of the activity will be. It is very important to answer the question about the objective of the lesson and skills of teaching. The teacher should try to figure out student learning issues and determine what the students are able to do after using the materials. When a teacher understands what result a student should receive, then there are more chances to prepare effective materials. Secondly, the teacher must prepare very simple materials. The teacher should not complicate the exercise or activities. Instructions for performing an exercise or activity should be short and clear. The teacher should remember that if the creation of materials has been spent a lot of time and they are too difficult for understanding and action, then these materials may not be effective for students. The teacher can get maximum involvement from the students if practiced in the simplest and most effective way. Also, the personalization of content is very helpful and important for teaching. The big advantage of, and a reason for, preparing materials is that the teacher can use the context of students and their personal lives and stories to create the materials memorable and meaningful to students. The teacher should create materials about students and the community as much as possible. It helps to absorb information easily and better way for learning. Creating materials, the teacher should think more about the content than about the appearance. Materials should not look very formal. The teacher should create materials that will help students use the language to communicate with each other. In order to understand the effectiveness of the materials, the teacher must try it first. After the teacher has prepared materials, the best way to understand their effectiveness is by trying it and make sure that the materials do what the teacher wants them to do. For example, after creation and using the material for reading, students can answer questions without reading, or after using flashcards the students got the new vocabulary. If students need to write using a specific grammatical structure, does the sample require the use of this structure? If materials do not work for the teacher, they will not work for students. Finally, the teacher should use materials with students. This is a very important stage because it helps the teacher understand the effectiveness of the materials and make correction of it. They probably won’t be perfect, but that’s not important because the most important thing is making notes on what worked and what did not so that the teacher can adapt them for the next lessons. The teacher should create more materials because it helps a teacher to be more professional, to understand students and their expectations. To sum up, we should say that creation of materials is important and helpful part of teaching and if the teacher is able to prepare materials in accordance with the main points, teaching process will be very effective and interesting for students. As a result, the learning of students will be more successful.
