Why shoul EFL teacher design their own material?

It is well known that teaching materials play an important role for most English teachers. In their article ‘Guidelines for Designing Effective English Language Teaching Materials’, Jocelyn Howard and Jae Mayor (2004) state that designed materials address students’ individual needs and provide them with the teacher’s own perspective about the topic to teach. Furthermore, they add that avoiding commercialized materials in the designing of a lesson plan allows educators to contextualize whatever they create. It is for these reasons that EFL teachers need to embrace the advantages of designing their own teaching materials.

There are some teachers who are against creating their own teaching material, and they prefer to work with traditional coursebooks to save time. However, the authors of the article strongly recommend the creation of our own teaching material, because in this sense teachers can select the topic and level of language that results more suitable for the wide variety of students attending to the same lesson. Moreover, the whole process of selection and creation of new material goes hand in hand with the consideration of each student’s personality, their interests and their capacities and capabilities. At the same time, including activities which are based on each learning stile allows motivation and engagement on the part of the students. (Howard and Mayor, 2004: 102)

Even though, available material may represent a temptation for many teachers, Howard and Major explain that creativity on the part of the teachers leads to contextualization and the possibility to leave aside the typical mismatching between the teaching context and typical coursebooks. Likewise, contextualized materials serve as tools for teaching the language through relevant activities for students, taking into account their particular context and culture, factors that play a crucial role in everyday teaching.

To sum up, the design of materials represents an advantage for L2 teachers as they can obtain better results from their students by contextualizing and adapting the different topics to the levels and needs of their students. Furthermore, it is also profitable for students as they can learn the foreign language in a way that is interesting, easy and meaningful for all of them.

If I have to provide my personal opinion about this topic, I would say that I am in favour of creating our own material, even though if it takes us long time to do so. Our students deserve lessons prepared and thought for them, with material that results relevant and adapted to their personal needs. I would not say that it is an easy job, but it is worth it. 
I would like to include a link of a slide share presentation, which I consider provides a useful summary of the article previously mentioned. https://es.slideshare.net/ronaldsuplidojr/guidelines-for-designing-effective-language-teaching-materials 

Refferences:

Howard J., Major J. (2004). Guidelines for Designing Effective English Language Teaching Materials. The TESOLANZ Journal, 101-109.