John Hughes is a teacher trainer and the author of over 50 titles including course books such as 'Life (National Geographic Learning) and 'Business Result' (Oxford University Press. His book with Lindsay Clandfield on how to write ELT materials is called 'ETpedia Materials Writing' (Pavilion ELT). With Kath Bilsborough, he has also launched a new online teacher training course in materials writing at www.writingeltmaterials.com

Email: john@hugheselt.com.

There is a surprising lack of training given to teachers on courses in how to write their own materials. For example, on initial teacher training courses, all the key skills and techniques are normally covered such as building rapport, classroom management, presenting new language and so on. And yet, the basic principles of writing some materials such as a short test, the questions for a reading comprehension, or the design of a board game are rarely if ever dealt with. Even if your trainee teachers are to be given published course materials to follow in many of their lessons, they still need and want to know how to create their own.

Instead, when it comes to training teachers to write materials, ELT often takes a 'learn from your mistakes' approach. In other words, that a teacher makes a worksheet for a lesson, finds out things that were wrong with it in class, and then tries to do better next time. Of course, that is a valid form of teacher development, but it is not the only form. There are many things that can be trained about materials writing beforehand in training sessions so - for example - why wait for the poor trainee teacher to discover they gapped the wrong type of words during a lesson when such a mistake could have been pre-empted in training?

If you run teacher training courses, then perhaps it's time to consider including at least one session in your course program on how to write materials. There are a variety of activity types which might help you address this key aspect of an ELT teacher's work. Here are three activities I often use in my own training sessions on materials writing:

1. Take a standard ELT exercise such as a gapfill exercise. It could be from a course book or one you have created for your own teaching. Then rewrite it with some mistakes in. For example, make the instructions too long and difficult. Include too many gaps with words you don't need to target and so on. Then give trainees the bad version first. Ask them to work together and identify why the exercise might fail. Then give them the 'correct' version and have them compare and finalise their list of things to avoid when writing an exercise.

2. Teachers find it hard to write for the correct level. So take an authentic piece of text (e.g. from the news) at C1+ level. Ask them to study it and imagine they want to use it with B1 level students. In pairs or groups, they try to identify which lexis (single words or chunks) will be above the B1 level and will need rewriting. Once they have circled these words in the text, have them check their intuition about level by running the text through a text checker such as 'TextInspector' or the 'Oxford Textchecker'. These types of sites will analyse the text and tell the teachers if they guessed correctly. It's a useful activity to develop teachers' ability to write for the correct level combining their own knowledge with freely available online tools.

3. When you give your trainees an actual writing task, it's normally best to set aside time for them after the session to work on it. And ideally, they'll also try it out in a lesson. However, you can include short mini-writing tasks to do during a session. One of the simplest activities is to have everyone think of a short 2-minute warmer that they might do with students. Then they have to write down the instructions for the activity so another teacher can understand what to do. Next, put the trainees in groups of three or four and they swap their instructions. With the new set of instructions, each person reads them and tries to follow the written instructions by doing the activity with their group. If the instructions are written clearly, then the teacher can set up the activity as intended. It's a fun way to share ideas for classroom activities but it also makes teachers think carefully about how they write instructional materials.