Teaching materials: adopting and adapting

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TEACHING MATERIALS: ADOPTING AND ADAPTING 
Phuangphet Tonawanik
1
Nawapun Donavanik
2
Abstract 
Teaching materials are important parts 
to help teachers achieve better teaching 
and students’ desired learning outcomes.
Carefully selecting materials, language 
teachers can present new knowledge and 
language items to be taught clearly, 
purposefully and systematically. As a 
result, students learn better because 
appropriate tools enhance their interest 
and understanding, practice and 
internalization. This paper aims to provide 
some suggestions for novice English 
teachers in selecting teaching materials. 
Practically, there are two processes to 
prepare teaching materials: Adopting and 
adapting. For adopting materials, any 
course-books or commercial textbooks 
can be used. However, using a textbook 
needs evaluation in order to select the 
most suitable materials for the course’ 
goals and objectives, students’ language 
proficiency 
and 
learning 
styles. 
Alternatively or additionally, teachers can 
use authentic materials that involve the 
real language use such as news, flyers, 
newsletters, etc. For adapting materials, 
the adaptation should reflect the concern 
of the course’s objectives as well as 
learning atmosphere and the student 
learning achievement. During the material 
preparation, teachers should evaluate the 
selected materials. Once the possible 
problem areas are recognized, teachers 
must consider the type of format 
adaptation and determine what activities 
to be adapted and how to adapt it to get 
the best of the material used.
 
Keywords: Teaching materials, adopting 
materials, authentic materials, adapting 
materials 
Introduction 
Teaching materials are important parts 
to help teachers achieve better teaching 
and students’ desired learning outcomes.
Carefully selecting materials, English 
teachers can present new knowledge and 
the language items to be taught clearly,
1,2
Suvarnabhumi Institute of Technology.

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วารสารวิชาการ สถาบันเทคโนโลยีแห่งสุวรรณภูมิ 
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purposefully and systematically. As a 
result, students learn better because 
appropriate tools enhance their interest 
and understanding, practice and 
internalization. For experienced English 
teacher, preparing teaching materials may 
be easy. However, for newly graduated 
teachers or novice teachers, particularly 
those who haven’t taken a course on 
material constructions, may have 
difficulties in preparing or selecting 
teaching materials. Some suggestions can 
be valuable to them. This article, 
therefore, presents some suggestions for 
novice English teachers on how to select 
teaching materials such as textbooks and 
authentic materials. It also suggests how 
to adapt the contents and activities of the 
selected materials to get the best of 
students’ learning outcomes.