One of the reasons that teachers find the thought of providing materials for independent study so daunting is that they think they will have to generate all of the materials themselves. Happily this is not the case. There are several valuablealternative sources:
EXISTING SCHOOL MATERIALS - Look around your school for any outdated or damaged textbooks.
USE WHAT YOU HAVE These can be cut up to provide activities in several skill areas and can be a particularly valuable source of grammarexercises. Single copies of textbooks and readers can also be used for independent study, as can dictionaries and tapes. Don't limit yourself to the EFL
closets though. The content area subjects are a good hunting ground for maps, charts, pictures, and process descriptions that can be uti-lized for information transfer activities. Using existing materials can be a good way to provide a quick core of activities in each skill area, leaving you free to produce more customized materials.
STUDENT-GENERATED As pointed out earlier, students can be actively engaged in language-MATERIALS learning tasks while generating materials that other learners can use
for independent study. This is a WIN-WIN situation, as it gives you a readily available source of assistantsand gives your students valu-able practice, plus a vested interest in the materials produced. Stu-dents learn grammar points much more painlessly if they are tasked with producing materials for other students to practice with.
These are some examples of materials students can produce:
written directions based on a map for other students to follow;
general knowledge quizzes with answer keys;
doze exercises made by deleting chosen items from a text. Other materials that students can create are marked in the activities section of this chapter.
O.K., we admit it. At some point you are going to need or want to make your own materials.
TEACHER-GENERATED MATERIALS But you don't have to make them from scratch. Usually, you will provide instructions and exercises to accompany existing materials, which gives your students a good opportunity to vary their' English diet by exposing them to all types of authentic materials. "Authen-tic" here means materials that were originally intended for native speakers. You will find yourself becoming an ardent collector of
magazines, newspapers, travel brochures, catalogues, maps, cook-books, games, lettc g, postcards, and forms. Cash in on your stu-dents' interest in your personal life. Letters with portions deleted are
a marvelous source of practicefor their infering skills. You can also record conversations with other PCVs and use them for listening-comprehension activities.
A good way to cut down on preparation time is for groupsof teach-ers to pool their resources andwork together on materials that they can all share.
So far we have dealt with the issues of control, error correction,and materials development. Let us now look at how to preserve and organize the materials we develop.
PRESERVING MATERIALS Once you've put together some materials, you are going to want them to last for a long time. So at the same time you are producing materials, you need to be looking for a secure place to keep them.
This is easy, of course, if you have your own classroom, but if,like most of us, you carry everything with you,cardboard boxes or
shop-ping bags are more likely to be the order of the day. Spaceand weight criteria may, therefore, limit the amount or type of materials you are willing to produce.
The next job will be to find a way to protect materials so thatthey can be used again and again. Here are somepossibilities, but you will probably want to experiment with what is locally available:
lamination
wide, transparent tape
plastic bags and staples or tape file folders
envelopes.
If, despite your efforts, your precious materials do get to look alittle dilapidated, console yourself with the thought that it is a sign of success. It means they are beingused.
ORGANIZING MATERIALS It is very important to organize the materials so that student can select them easily. Otherwise all your students will need yourhelp at
the same time. Your system of organization will depend on the amount and variety of materialsavailable and the way you intend to use them. However, the easieststarting point is probably to divide the materials into skill areas first. With a small amount of materials, you could use a file folderfor each skill area, but he ready to move into boxes as you expand!
Within each skill area, activities can be color coded to show their level. The teacher can then recommend a particular level to a stu-dent, and if a student finds an activity too easy or toodifficult he is
184 PEACE CORPS MANUAL
able to select another one at a higher or lower level. You may also find it useful to further subdivide activities within some skill areas.
For example, within the grammar activities section, it is useful to group together activities that practice the same grammarpoint.
As suggested earlier, it is also important to provide the students with a way to check their own answers. Thiswill often take the form of an answer key, but a less familiar,fun alternative is to use self-cor-rection jigsaw pictures.
Start out with a list of cues and responses.
For example, the cues could be:
1 questions needing answers, or 2 words needing definitions, or 3 words needing opposites.
These would then be the responses :
1 answers,
2 definitions, and 3 opposites.
Having selected the cues and responses, find a large magazine pic-ture and mount it on construction paper (cardA) and provide another piece of construction paper the same size and shape (card B). Using a pencil and ruler, divide both cards into the same number of sections (see examples below). Then write a cue on each section of card B and write the corresponding responses on the back
of the picture card in a mirror image of the cues. Two examples are provided below:
CUE CARD opposite
RIGHT
PICTURE CARD
WRONG ARROW
B
FAT THIN
ammi010.11, WIDE
THICK BIG CLEAN DIRTY SMALL THIN
NASTY NICE GOOD SHARP
1
BLUNT BAD
1 4
185CUE CARD prepositions
71rmalanWOMA1
PICTURE CARD
THE NOOK HE PUT THE LIFTED THE
WAS DISHES_ MAT AND UNDER I N ON
THE TABLE. THE CASINO%PUT THE KEY IT.
THE GIRL LOOK THE RAN THEWINDOWCHILDREN
THE HOUSE. AND YOU WALKED ALONG SMALL INTO
WILL SEE
HIM. THE PATH.
HE HEARD ALWAYS
A NOISE LOOK A PLANE
USUALLY IN
HIM FO YOU AND FLIES ABOVE FRONT BEHIND
HE TURNED YOU WONT
FALL THECLOUDS. OF
`AROUND.
Cut the picture card into sections and store it with the uncut cue card. The student's task is to take out the uncut cue card and place the correct response on top of each cue . When the task is
com-pleted the student turns the response cards over and magically the picture appears. If there is a problem with the picture, the students need to go back and reconsider their answers.
In some activities, particularly in speaking and listening, the com-pletion of the task itself indicates success in the activity. For exam-ple, Draw the Picture, described in Chapter Four of the
TEFLJTESL Manual, could be used as an independent study activ-ity by two students. One student is given a picture and told to describe it to his or her partner in such a way that this partner can draw it without seeing the picture. In this activity the accomplish-ment of the task indicates that successful communicationhas taken place and the students require no further feedback.