Making the Most of The TEFL Lab’s PDF Support Materials

If you’ve been working with The TEFL Lab’s ready-to-teach lessons for any amount of time, you’ve probably seen a series of PDFs that are included in each module. What are they there for?

We’ve included these handy PDF support materials as a way for you to have a deliverable to the learner that helps them review some key concepts from a lesson and get some extra practice with the target language. Let’s see a breakdown below of how to make the most of these PDF support materials!

Reviewing Key Concepts

One of the most important features of these materials is that they are coordinated with specific lessons to provide learners with a breakdown of the key concepts to review after class. We know that having a visual aid is really useful for adult learners, so we’ve built these PDFs to be attractive, clear, and useful study aids. After you’ve taught a lesson, you can download the PDF that corresponds to it and share it with your learners via e-mail. Encourage them to review the material between now and your next lesson together!

Practice Writing Skills

Another important function of these PDF support materials is to encourage learners to practice their writing skills. Writing is a form of production that can be tricky to work into synchronous lessons, especially with group classes! Still, we don’t want to leave learners without any practice. A happy compromise here is to assign writing tasks for homework! Each of these PDFs has a light-colored box at the bottom with some time of production prompt. You can allow learners to choose one, or you can assign one or both. The prompt will elicit the target language of the lesson that this PDF corresponds to, so you’ve got your homework assignments pre-made and ready to go as well!

Encourage learners to respond to these prompts via email, and incorporate their review into the beginning of your next lesson together. Alternatively, you can respond to their emails with individual feedback and take stock of which errors you find across most of the writing samples in the class in order to review that material together again.

Our goal with the teacher toolkit is to free teachers up to teach the best classes they’ve ever taught without getting bogged down by lesson planning duties or homework assignments. That’s why our PDF support materials, while not lessons themselves, are still such an essential part of the toolkit.

When you have an easy way to provide an extension of the lesson to your learners, they’re more likely to review and practice on their own, come to class prepared and with interesting questions, and progress more evenly. Pair that with the time you save on creating materials, and everyone wins!