This highly practical and interactive course aims to develop a principled approach to the evaluation of materials, both published and self-made, so that your materials are informed by SLA theories, principles and your beliefs as a teacher.

This course will help you to develop your skills for the future and make you confident enough as a materials designer that you are willing to share what you do with the wider ELT community.

Who is this course for?

This course is for teachers who want to make great lesson materials for their students or to share with other teachers and the wider ELT community. Get ready to be creative!

What will you achieve?

By the end of this course you will be able to:

• Assess and evaluate materials and understand what makes good teaching and learning materials
• Design materials around texts to develop receptive skills
• Design materials for developing productive skills
• Design material for teaching specific language items
• Evaluate the effectiveness of your own materials and adapt them to suit the needs of different learners
• Understand effective materials design and layout
• Write effective instructions

Course outline

This is a very practical course. A lot of class time will be in the form of workshops where you will work with your fellow teachers to create, evaluate and adapt materials based on the needs of your students, and you will be asked to complete a number of practical activities during the course.

The course also includes input from your tutors. During the week we will look at some of the key areas and issues in materials development, such as principles underpinning materials design, the role of coursebooks, findings from SLA research, the role of the local syllabus or curriculum, teacher agency and learner motivation.

We will also explore how a teacher can move into materials development, from sharing with peers, presenting at conferences to getting your materials published. We will bring materials to the sessions for evaluation, but this course will be more practical if you can bring materials from your own teaching context that we can explore.