STUDENT-INVESTED MATERIAL: BALANCING TEACHER CONTROL & STUDENT INTEREST

There is some consensus to date that for students to be motivated in the
EFL class, their classwork should include content which is of personal
interest to them. Problems can arise, however, in trying to bring content
with greater student appeal into the classroom. Teachers may feel
obligated to sacrifice, to some extent, the instructional focus of the
coursework. This paper describes a procedure, called the StudentInvested
Material procedure (SIM), that the authors developed to solve
this dilemma.SIM does so by incorporating topics of personal relevance
to students into activities that focus on language skill development, by
having them generate their own material. In the procedure, students frrSt
use" teacher-prepared material, then make their own material patterned
after the teacher's, and finally use this student-made material in communicative
activities. In settings as diverse as Japan, Niger, and Greece,
SIM has enabled the authors to maintain both student interest and the
framework of the curriculum.