Without question, the ever-increasing number of textbooks and CDs available to teachers of ESL (English as a Second Language) is a valuable resource. The Internet is yet another resource with a phenomenal number of lesson plans, interactive quizzes, visual aids and reference material. I use as much of it as I can but teachers should not overlook the wealth of local teaching material available to them where they are teaching. After all, the key to making learning enjoyable is to make it relevant to the students. Teachers who don't do that have little reason to wonder why their students get bored, avoid class, don't do homework and don't pay attention.

Sure, if you teach in a large city, the locally available material will be plentiful but I think creative teachers can find many resources around them - even in a small rural village. Daily and weekly newspapers are a ready source of new material. If you are lucky enough to be teaching where the local newspaper has an online version, your task in copying and creating lessons or exercises will be that much easier.

Using Local Resources

1. Take any short news article (make it relevant to the age and comprehension level of your students). Remove the verbs and put these in a menu at the top of the article. Have the students figure out where they go. Do the same with nouns, adjectives or prepositions.

2. You may be able to find an article written in both English and the native language. Keep these in a file. Students can use the native article to help them with the exercise and with understanding the English one.

3. Have students 'reverse paraphrase' an article from a local paper. In other words, change the meaning to the opposite.

4. Aside from newspapers, local brochures, signs, notices or newsletters can easily be converted into lessons by a creative ESL teacher. Use these for grammar correction or vocabulary-building.

5. Make up a questionnaire and take your students to a local attraction or station where they can talk to foreigners and complete the questionnaires. Then, back in class, students can make written or oral reports.

6. Who in your community would come in and talk to your class in English? Topics can be wide-ranging from fire safety to street-proofing to future job opportunities in the community.

7. What problems are important in your community? Develop lessons around these and have students suggest solutions. This makes a good research and report project that they can then send on to whomever in the community should see it. Perhaps that person might even come to your class and give his or her reaction, respond to questions or participate in a class discussion. This is a good idea to tie in with tense work - past, present and future.

8. Does someone in the community need help translating a brochure or document into English? As long as it is not a legal document, you could offer to do this as a class project. Here, of course, your class would have to have a reasonably good level of comprehension. Good vocabulary idea, though!

9. How about a class newsletter about happenings in your school? It could be in both English and the native language and distributed locally. This is the kind of project that can lead to some additional work for the teacher in the form of tutoring or local corporate teaching.

10. How about developing an ESL class webpage? There are many webpage templates available and all you have to do is cut and paste. To find these, search Google or Yahoo for "free web templates". Chances are some of your students will have good computer skill so even if you are a techno-peasant when it comes to web publishing, your class may get right into it. The danger here is that it has to continue to be fun. If it becomes a chore, students will get bored and forget about it.

Put on your creative cap. Look around you. You will find many opportunities to augment your ESL text with local resources. I'd be interested in hearing how any of these ideas work for you.

Dr. Robert Taylor has been teaching English in Thailand for close to ten years. He also teaches the online TESOL course for Sunbridge Institute of English http://www.teachesl.org

If you would like a copy of my e-book "Introduction to Teaching Overseas", contact me at rwftaylor@gmail.com

Dr. Robert Taylor