122 Part II: Putting Your Lesson Together
✓ Authentic materials are so ‘of the moment’ that you need some knowl-
edge of current affairs and culture to really appreciate them and they
soon become out of date.
✓ It takes time to select, adapt and/or prepare them.
However, using authentic materials really motivates students because it gives
them a glimpse of what they’ll be able to access in English when their lan-
guage skills improve.
In my case, I learned a foreign language with the help of children’s pro-
grammes. They were authentic shows at the right level for me and they actu-
ally gave me an insight into the culture. I gradually moved on to daytime TV
and finally the news. I found that, unlike the lessons in my student’s books,
the language I learned from TV shows was exactly what ‘real people’ said. My
expressions and pronunciation were not as dry and stilted as friends who’d
only studied in the classroom. I’m not suggesting that you take recordings of
children’s TV shows into your classroom but the principle remains that if your
students want to learn to speak like natives, expose them to authentic speech
and texts.
Designing Your Own Materials
If you happen to be in a situation where there are few, if any, published mate-
rials, or if you’re just a creative soul, you can have a stab at designing your
own materials to keep and re-use. I say re-use, because it’s easy to spend
hours preparing the perfect lesson and then forget to file a copy away for
another class, effectively loosing the benefit of your work.
To combat this I offer a few tips to help you:
✓ Use cards and laminating so that you won’t have to cut things up again
next time.
✓ You don’t have to make one for each student. Group and pair work
encourages speaking so just make enough to share.
✓ To get full use of your materials, build your whole lesson around the
theme.
I’ve seen some beautifully designed materials used for just three minutes
in a lesson and then forgotten because the teacher didn’t consider how
to exploit their design. So, if you’ve recorded a conversation that you
want to use as a listening activity, ask the students to predict what the
conversation is going to be about, compare their ideas, analyse the tape-
script, imagine the characters who are speaking, describe them, extend
the conversation themselves, role play it and so on.
