Searching for and choosing teaching resources can be very contradictory. On one hand, teachers may be overwhelmed about the enormous amount and variety of resources they can access through different means, both digital and traditional.
However, when finding teaching resources adapted to the needs of a particular group of students, or even for CLIL methodology, the wide range of possibilities mentioned before is dramatically reduced.
As Kelly (2014) points out: “The lesson is simply this: CLIL is easier and more effective if you have ‘custom-made’ resources and can be much harder and less effective without them.”
When talking about native resources I refer to web pages in English, or text books, that follow the curriculum from the original country, most of the cases are British or American. In order to adapt these resources to our classroom we have to compare the different curricula and make the correspondent equivalences between levels. Sometimes the best option is choosing lower level resources for the language level will be accesible to our students.
The following blog is aimed to bilingual primary teachers as a bank of resources for all the topics of the curriculum taking into account the importance of using authentic materials.
Choosing resources and materials adapted to learning activities and to the needs of the students is always hard work for teachers. This task becomes harder when choosing the materials for the teaching of contents in a foreign language.
There is no doubt that if we choose the option of using native resources for teaching a foreign language, the input that learners receive is higher, richer and more varied. But this, also requires the adaptation of these resources to the level, to the curriculum and to the cultural aspects that implies.