More than just a worksheet: how to write effective classroom materials.

Many teachers produce their own materials, either from necessity or to provide something more tailored to the needs of their students. However, writing materials for a whole lesson, which really engage the learners and focus effectively on language, is quite a challenge. Teachers learn through experience, but are rarely given much support or training in this area.

In this session, given at IATEFL 2014, and recorded earlier for the British Council Seminar Series, I looked at  a simple recipe or template (based on Hutchinson and Waters 1987) for producing complete lessons, and considered a variety of do’s and don’ts taken from my experience as a professional materials writer.  There are plenty of practical examples and tips, as well as mini tasks to try.

Click the picture for the link to the recording (also including an interesting presentation non using corpora in the classroom, by Adam Kilgarriff).

The handout with a summary of the main points, and the links, is available below as a PDF.

More than just a worksheet handout – Rachael Roberts