Unit 23

Consulting reference resources to help in lesson preparation

Teaching English, or any other subject, is not an easy process. However, there are different steps to facilitate any problem that a teacher might have. It is important to choose the appropriate reference material which, of course, helps teachers in their lesson preparation. By consulting this type of reference resources, the teaching process will develop smoothly.

With that been said, it is worth mentioning that coursebooks are essential in a class because they have activities and information that help, for example, at the moment of teaching grammatical structures in a non-conventional way. Another reference material that works really well with most of the students is the dictionary. Dictionaries help for checking spelling, pronunciation or the correct use of lexical items. For example, students can use bilingual or monolingual dictionaries depending the aim of the class. Also, experience helps teacher to anticipate students' language problems according to their skills or needs. Those aspects are important when using supplementary material, such as websites, flashcards or games.

In my future professional life I will consider all these aspects since I am pretty sure they are very important. For sure, I will ask my students to use monolingual dictionaries as a tool in their learning process. These tools are really useful since they not only show definitions but also the part of the speech, correct pronunciation and even examples. 

Even though teachers differ one another, reference resources are tools which help them in the class. As it was stated above, there is a range of materials which are useful depending the situation and the students' skills.

For further information, you can check the following sources:

Koszalka, T. A., Breman, J., & Moore, M. K. (1999). Sharing lesson plans over the World Wide Web: important components. Education and Information Technologies, 4(2), 143-151.


Deuff, D., & Yamamoto, T. (2005). Lesson Preparation Environment Setup based on Interviews with Teachers in History. In Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (Vol. 2005, No. 1, pp. 3805-3812).