Materials and Resources

1. RATIONALE

We live in Bogotá, Colombia. The materials herein proposed by the three of us were chosen based on our common teaching context.   We all work for the English Extension courses of the National University of Colombia in Bogotá. This Institution offers English courses to general audience who are interested in learning and/or bettering their English skills. We have chosen the first level to apply this Materials and Resources assignment. The groups are composed of 18 students whose age ranges from 18 to 60 years; with a total number of 8 hours of English class a week. The textbook selected by the teaching staff is New American English File by Oxford. This course book combines traditional teaching methods with more recent approaches, and with a special emphasis on Phonetics. However, like many other course books, this book was designed assuming that all students have the same language level. About evaluation, students are assessed formally and informally.

Nevertheless, when we pay close attention to our learners’ characteristics and our educational setting, nothing seems to be enough. We feel the need to create our own material in order to meet our learners’ demands, adapt, or modify some materials from different textbooks or sources adding some supplementary ones to get closer in our approach to the understanding of our students’ interests and characteristics. The different trends and developments in theories of language learning and teaching which have most influence the nature of materials written over the last ten years, help us to be aware of the different aspects of language which must be taken into account when designing materials.   But at the same time, those trends and theories show us the wide spectrum English teachers are involved in when deciding what to teach, when to teach, how to teach, in what context and why.

The first and most important factor that was considered at the moment of designing the materials was the students’ needs,...