Five important components--students, a teacher, materials, teaching methods, and evaluation

Good morning / Good afternoon dear members of board and listeners. I am Ruxsora Marupova from the group 244. I’m very glad to present my qualification paper to you. My research work is dedicated to the Strategies of Selecting and Developing Teaching materials. Teaching materials come in many shapes and sizes, but they all have in common the ability to support learning. The purpose and importance of teaching and learning materials is to make lessons interesting, learning easy and enable teachers to easily express concepts. So first I’d like to speak about the importance of materials in language instruction.
Language instruction has five important components--students, a teacher, materials, teaching methods, and evaluation. Why are materials important in language instruction? What do materials do in language instruction? Can we teach English without a textbook?
Allwright (1990) argues that materials should teach students to learn, that they should be resource books for ideas and activities for instruction/learning, and that they should give teachers rationales for what they do. From Allwright's point of view, textbooks are too inflexible to be used directly as instructional material. O'Neill (1990), in contrast, argues that materials may be suitable for students' needs, even if they are not designed specifically for them, that textbooks make it possible for students to review and prepare their lessons, that textbooks are efficient in terms of time and money, and that textbooks can and should allow for adaptation and improvisation.
There are many reasons why English language teachers may choose to construct their own teaching materials, despite the availability of commercially produced materials. Teaching materials form an important part of most English teaching programs. From textbooks, videotapes, and pictures to the Internet, teachers rely heavily on a diverse range of materials to support their teaching and their students’ learning. They influence the content and the procedures of learning. The choice of deductive vs inductive learning, the role of memorization, the use of creativity and problem solving, production vs. reception, and the order in which materials are presented are all influenced by the materials.
There are many advantages of developing teaching materials. They are:

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  Contextualization
  
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  Availability
  
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  Meets individual needs
  
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  Personalisation
  
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  Timeliness
  
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  Avoid the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach
  

However, there are several problems that we can face while selecting and designing materials. According to my graduation paper conclusions there are some key factors to consider when selecting instructional materials which may help us overcome some problems:
Take into consideration individual needs and learning styles:
Choose materials that present information in a variety of ways. Using mixed media (text, video, images, real world examples, graphs, etc.) make information more interesting and address learners’ different learning styles.
Make sure the materials support learning objectives:
Provide a wide range of materials that will enrich and support the curriculum and course objectives. The instructional materials should reinforce and supplement, not substitute for, the teacher’s teaching efforts.
Make the materials clear and accessible:
Make sure learners have sufficient background knowledge to comprehend the learning materials.
This is the end of my presentation, thank you for your attention.

Extra information about advantages:

An important advantage of teacher-produced materials is contextualization. For many teachers, designing or adapting their own teaching materials, enables them to take into account their particular learning environment and to overcome the lack of ‘fit’ of the coursebook.
Another aspect of context is the resources available. Some teaching contexts will be rich in resources such as coursebooks, supplementary texts, readers, computers, audio-visual equipment and consumables such as paper, pens and so on.
A second area in which teacher-designed materials are an advantage is that of individual needs. Modern teaching methodology increasingly emphasises the importance of identifying and teaching to the individual needs of learners. English language classrooms are diverse places not only in terms of where they are situated, but also in terms of the individual learners within each context. Teacher-designed materials can be responsive to the heterogeneity inherent in the classroom.
In designing their own materials teachers can also make decisions about the most appropriate organising principle or focus for the materials and activities.
Personalisation is another advantage of teacher-designed materials. In his 1991 article, Block argues in favour of ‘home-made’ materials saying that they add a personal touch to teaching that students appreciate.
A further advantage of teacher-designed materials is timeliness (Block, 1991). Teachers designing their own materials can respond to local and international events with up-to-date, relevant and high interest topics and tasks. The teachable moment can be more readily seized.
So, the advantages of teacher-designed materials can be summed up in the idea that they avoid the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach of most commercial materials.