THE IMPORTACE OF MATERIALS IN THE TEACHING PROCESS

Teacher: Felicia Rusnac

Company: IH BUCHAREST

MATERIALS

Broadly, the teaching and learning materials term refers to a spectrum of educational materials that teachers use in the classroom to support specific learning objectives, as set out in lesson plans.

Learning and teaching materials along with teacher qualifications are important determinants of the quality of education. As stressed above, teachers we use them to support specific learning objectives, as set out in lesson plans: I always have a set of materials that includes: flashcards, CDs, posters, story books, manipulative, blocks, samples of student writing, videos, games, model clay.

There are many types of learners within in my class. As Gardner's research indicates teachers should aim to appeal to all the different learner types at some point during the course. He says it is particularly important to appeal to visual learners, as a very high proportion of learners have this type of intelligence. Flash cards can be bright and colourful and make a real impact on visual learners. Many activities played with flashcards can help also the kinaesthetic learners.

Music is a tool that it has many times proven if used, benefits and connections to the body, brain and learning that are important and can aid in language achievement if you are an auditory learner.

I could not miss the opportunity to use both of these resources last week with my 6-7 years old students. They love animals and like everything related to this topic. They also like songs. They have a lot of vocabulary and many English knowledge and they are more and more interested in literacy.I had a set of wild animal flashcards (A5 flashcards, they picture the lion, the monkey, the crocodile, the snake, the zebra and a tiger. They were really colorful and specific. The students without any help easily recognized the animals) and an alphabet song (very nice song, the song can be found in the Happy House kit. It’s the song number 4)I introduced wild animals connected with an activity where students had to identify the letters of the alphabet. Each student had to name an animal that started with letter c, l, m, t, s, and z. This way the students revised the alphabet and fixed the connection between letter, symbol and word through many drilling activities. The children had the chance to hear, say, see, and mime the letters and the words.

By singing the alphabet song they learnt all the letters in the correct order and they knew that the crocodile starts with c, the monkey starts with m, the lion starts with l, the snake starts with s and the tiger starts with t.

These materials used in these types of activities helped me as a teacher to help the students understand better and learn better depending on their specific learning styles as follows.

The auditory learners prefer to receive ideas and information by hearing them. These students sometimes really struggle with reading and writing, but excel at memorizing

spoken words such as song lyrics. The students benefited from the oral presentations and also by hearing the song repeatedly. By the end of the lesson they sang the song and when the music stopped they knew what letter was next.

The visual learners prefer to receive information by seeing it. These students pay much attention to detail. They are less likely to speak in class than their auditory peers, and generally use few words when they do. The flashcards helped the students learn, understand and achieve language faster.The Kinaesthetic-Tactile learners tend to learn best via movement and touch. These students are often labelled “hyperactive” because they tend to move around a great deal.Because they like movement, they learn best when allowed to explore and experience their environment. By singing, gesturing and dancing the students had the opportunity to be doing something and learn in the same time.

It is important to be careful when choosing your materials for a lesson and taking into consideration all these learning styles.

Also the materials should be adapted to every student need and also be manipulated by students and provide them with a reason to speak/use the target language.

Different materials help to make our lessons, and consequently the target language, more memorable for students. This makes the materials memorable.

By using materials in a variety of ways we give students the opportunity to generate a lot of language. This makes the materials achievable.

Materials are really important in the learning process. Materials should be appropriate for a particular class need to have an underlying instructional philosophy, approach, method and technique which suit the students and their needs. They should address to all learning styles.