What I know about writing resources

I’ve been writing classroom materials for nigh on 50 years, as a classroom teacher for around 33 of them. When I was teaching I did so for a few reasons:

• The textbook resources didn’t match what I wanted to do with a particular class. 
• I enjoyed the creative side of it.
• To share with colleagues - not so much as a prime reason, but it was a desirable outcome.

In the old days we used Banda machines and Gestetners, OHP transparencies, flashcards and, later, the photocopier. Nowadays I work mainly with Word and PowerPoint, sharing with teachers around the world via frenchteacher.net. So I now have a pecuniary reason for writing materials, as well as enjoying it. 

So what things do I know about resource writing, and - by extension- what principles do I apply?

I often come back to the foundation of second language learning, i.e. interacting with comprehensible input. So a fundamental consideration is: does this resource supply input and the opportunity to use it for communication? This leads me to favour resources like these:

• Information gap tasks of all sorts, including simple guessing games, more complex “text discovery” tasks and task-orientated discussions.
• Reading texts + exercises to process, manipulate and produce language.
• Listening (including video) texts + exercises to process, manipulate and produce language.
• Games that involve input, communication and fun. I have a soft spot for Battleships, board games, guessing games and whole class communicative games like Alibi.
• Dialogues to get students reading, listening, using and adapting language. These may be situational.
• Creative storytelling tasks using pictures and picture sequences.
• Grammar exercises and drills, sometimes mechanical, sometimes contextualised in topics.
• PowerPoint slides to introduce and practise new vocabulary and constructions.
• Sentence builders (à la Conti) to model language transparently.
• Exam prep materials - largely because these are in demand and favoured by many teachers.
• Vocabulary building tasks of various kinds, but not so much lists of isolated words.
• Starters which are easy to implement, create retrieval practice and are more about listening and speaking than writing.
• Parallel texts + exercises which give students access to interesting cultural content or stories.
• Specific, focused listening tasks such as “Faulty transcript”, “Spot the differences” listening and narrow listening.

I always have in mind the questions “Would I use this resource?” “Would it work?”. Because my classroom experience was mainly with higher-achievers my resources tend to reflect that bias, so I have to try to simplify materials with mixed-attainment pupils in mind. I need to try harder on that!

Another consideration is: does this resource allow for thorough processing of language? For example, I would avoid produciing a text with just a few true/false or comprehension questions, since this would not allow students to engage in an intensive, detailed way with the language. There would be a lack of repetition and failure to create enough interaction with the text. So I much prefer to create a range of activities to accompany a text, incuding true/false, mutli-choice, questions in the target language, gap-fills, translation, sentence completion and so on. Ideally I would give an opportunity to get pupils speaking and writing, using the text as a model. By doing this, students would see, hear and reuse chunks of language many times over. All this is good for long-term memory.

This implies, by the way, that texts should not be too long and that audio/video extracts should normally be under 3 minutes long. Longer texts make it harder to generate repetition and recycling. Similarly, practice exercises need enough examples to generate repetition and deep processing of language. Textbooks often don't have enough space to allow for enough practice.

I also think in terms of how easy a resource would be to exploit. So I like resources to be ready-to-use, demanding little preparation from the teacher. I know how pressured teachers are. A good resource effectively becomes the lesson.

A minor dilemma is the tension between what I want to write and what my customers want. I know my grammar exercises are used a lot, so I make sure there are enough of these. But I am more excited by the thought of designing a good communicative lesson than a grammar exercise. To state the obvious, language acquisition is about using language, not describing or analysing it.

These days I make a lot of use of AI to speed up production and for text writing. AI is not always a reliable producer of effective lessons, but it is good at creating text and exercises, drawing as it does from huge amounts of online examples. Some light editing is almost always needed. I now produce more multi-choice exrcises thansk to AI. Without it, MCQs are laborious to design.

To be productive, I also reuse the same templates and ideas several times over. For example, a board game template or resource type can be recycled. Examples would be narrow reading/listening, "text discover" information gap tasks, board games, crosswords using armoredpenguin.com, parallel text resources and faulty transcript tasks. Some teachers may find this re-use of lesson templates comforting and familier for them and their pupils.

To conclude, writing new resources is rarely a chore and it's a constant challenge is to come up with fresh ideas, new texts, interesting ausio and videos. I cannot claim to be very original, but I do have a keen sense of what works and what will be productive. It is also my main source of income these days, so that provides some motivation in itself.

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