Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in New Mexico? Are you interested in teaching English in Las Vegas, New Mexico? Check out our opportunities in Las Vegas, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English in your community or abroad! Teflonline.net offers a wide variety of Online TESOL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Here Below you can check out the feedback (for one of our units) of one of the 16.000 students that last year took an online course with ITTT!
This unit focuses on course books and lesson materials. The materials we can bring to the classroom include: a white/wipe board, visual aids, worksheets, video, cassettes/CDs/DVDs/electronic media, dictionaries, course books, resource books, photocopiers, computers and OHPs. Since the majority of the unit content revolved around course books and other types of materials, I will focus on those for the remainder of the overview.
For starters, there are two types of materials that ESL teachers can use in the classroom: authentic materials and created materials.
Authentic materials include, but are not limited to songs, newspapers, books, poems, menus, brochures and songs. They are materials that native English speakers normally listen to or read; they are real. Some of the benefits of authentic materials is that they tend to be more interesting and motivating for the students. Students become more confident through the use of them too. They are easier because they can cater to the interests of a group of students. The downside is that they are not graded or leveled, so the teacher has to do extra legwork to assess the suitability for each material in regards to his/her students' needs/levels/interests.
Created materials, on the other hand, tend to be designed specifically for classroom use – typically by the teacher. They are often used to replace or supplement a course book. These types of materials are often also referred to as non-authentic. Examples of created materials include, but are not limited to: flashcards, crossword puzzles, word search puzzles, role play cards, picture stories, gap-fill activities and games.
The importance of course books tends to be a contentious point amongst ESL teachers. There is no consensus on this matter, but the four essential things to remember is that as a teacher you can choose to omit parts of a lesson, a full lesson or multiple lessons based on the interests and needs of your students. As a teacher you can also replace lessons or activities with more suitable ones. An useful approach is to supplement the course book with additional material. Lastly, you can adapt the topic in the course book using your own materials.
