Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Xiong'erzhai XiAng? Are you interested in teaching English in Beijing? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
Creating materials Why not making the learning process pleasant, pertinent and interesting by tailoring your classes around your students? The approach on creating materials permits you to adapt the lessons to your students' needs, even combining such materials with textbooks and other ESL, realia and adapted authentic materials to create your own. It gives you the chance to produce lessons that are useful for the student's everyday life, generating a genuine interest that transcends English learning and involves actual communication. You can produce a lesson that will lead your students' curiosity to explore the language in a spontaneous way since the topics would be those that your students would be interested in even when they aren't inside the English classroom. Creating material is a great idea to give your lessons flexibility and dynamism, making sure to maintain a healthy learning pace that includes all areas of language skills, and that is focused on enforcing your students specific trouble areas. Being used to create your own material is a great way to exercise your teaching skills, to explore fun ways to get knowledge through to your students by stimulating them with targeted themes. Creating material around authentic ones gives you a chance to grab topics that come from outside the classroom taking into account information that might be useful for the students, this brings in local and global up to date concerns (such as music, art, entertainment, current events, and material that has to do with the country or city where the students live or wish to live in, etc...), which can definitely work great for grammar, role-play and even discussion activities and much more. The kinds of materials that an esl teacher can create for their lessons go from flash cards, to billboards, worksheets, game boards, games, questionaries and any other creative production that they might consider useful for teaching. An important issue on creating these types of material is to be able to link them with real demands, adapting your vocabulary to the student's language level and following the lesson's topic. The aesthetics of the material you create can be very relevant for its success, some guidelines can help you understand how to tailor student-friendly material: ? Keep a professional look: Produce material that looks as if it was not made by you, in the sense that a clean, easy to read, well divided worksheet helps your students go through it easier. Prefer printing your worksheets other than handwriting them. Take your time to look for quality pictures to use, you might find useful searching on royalty free image's web sites, or if you can do some drawing yourself. Take care on the video and audio quality of any material you intend to produce. Make your students feel important by providing them material that shows that the teacher really made an effort. ? Keep a unity: Make material which has a recognizable face. Material tailored for your lessons should have a common layout language, for example don't change the way you present the instructions from one worksheet to the other. An good idea would be to choose an easy to read font to apply it to any written material you are creating, and try to stick to a common layout cage. Label every piece with the name of the school on the bottom of the page (or any information so that anyone can identify the worksheet to the class), and give a title to each worksheet you create. This will be useful for the students not to mix the class' worksheets with other materials they might have, and will come in very handy for you to file them and reuse them whenever it will be necessary. ? Protect your material: Some of the material that you can create for your classes may be used more than once, for this purpose take your time to protect it so that it could be handled without getting damaged. Laminate your card sets and game boards, put them away either in envelopes or zip lock bags remembering to label them. Have a place to store the classes material that adapts with the space conditions you have,if you don't have a locker in the school to keep your material, make sure that it is easy to carry around. Keep all of the editable files for future adaptions. Link your material with your textbook and lesson plans. The corpus of material you create will enrich your lessons, help you cover special areas that you might find important to work on and that are not taken into account by the textbook you're working with, bring spice and dynamism to your class, help you improve your rapport with your students and provide you with material that you can reuse in the future adapting it every time to your needs.
