Are students really benefiting from materials created by their own teachers?

No EFL book or resource will ever satisfy teacher's expectations when choosing materials. Every classroom context differs in several aspects: cultural background, proficiency level, age, interests, and types of intelligences of participants in the teaching-learning process-being these teachers or learners. These features are to lead material designers into production of instructional tasks that are appropriate not only to the approach being followed but also to the conditions of a specific population. It is known that the final product of these materials end up being either so standard that they do not really meet students' needs or so specific that students would struggle with them. This is when material adapting or developing takes place. Most EFL teachers have decided to produce their own exercises and activities or improve the ones that come from publishers. There are certain factors that should not be left aside in order for teachers to come up with effective and beneficial materials.
First, the level of English for a given task must be defined. It is recommended by Tomlinson that the input learners are exposed to be authentic in use, which requires cognitively challenging processes (8). At the same time, through material development, students have to be taught to develop learning skills; therefore, the so-hard-to-understand video that the teacher decides to download from the web becomes comprehensible if scaffolding is enhanced. In other words, it is the teacher's responsibility to analyze the kind of language materials, whose source does not have a teaching purpose at first, may have. After this is inquired, pre and follow-up exercises help learners take advantage of more real input. It is not as simple as just playing a movie or a song to "kill some time"; having as-real-life-as-possible exercises is time-consuming for teachers, who are to promote that learners enjoy authenticity in materials.
The quality of resources in terms of colors, distribution of space, clarity in pictures, size in illustrations and fonts, among others, is to be considered in material development. In fact, teachers should detect possible flaws in their own creations just like a publicist does in designing advertisements. There must be a systematically organized fashion in materials. Based on my personal experience as an EFL, good materials that follow this principle of organization are the ones that keep the flow of the class, where there are no gaps between one activity and the other one or where the teacher does not have to take a lot of time telling students how to decode procedures in exercises. Materials that are not that effective are the ones in which learners feel like not doing them; this may be caused in case a handout is too crowded and there is even no space for completing exercises, for instance. Above all, teachers have to get accustomed to the idea that materials their pupils are using have to be visually attractive. This sense of attractiveness will make students be more motivated and engaged in their learning process.
We have to bear in mind that the more teachers personalize materials to the target class, the more meaningful learners will find these materials. Some teachers would say that this would mean taking a lot of work home; it is indeed tons of work, which pays off when teachers see their students learning in all senses: developing confidence in using real language for communicative purposes and self-investing their attention in learning (Tomlinson 9-12). Those extra minutes spent in cutting and pasting are worth the effort.

Bibliography:

Tomlinson, Brian. Material Development in Language Teaching. UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print.