Like many online newspapers, the Guardian website has a news in pictures section. Sometimes the images on offer are so good that they write their own lesson plans. The above photograph for example comes from a slideshow titled What they thought of next - a series of pictures from the 36th International Exhibition of Invention which is currently taking place in Geneva. The obvious use for these images would be for a speaking activity in which students have to guess what each invention is for.

If the secret to good cooking is good ingredients, then the secret to a good lesson plan is good material. With access to online resources such as image sites, podcasts, YouTube, Wikipedia, digital newspapers and learner-friendly corpora, there is no more need for the modern language teacher to create his or her own materials than there is a for a chef to rear his or her own chickens.

I feel that it is necessary to point this out because I have often noticed an unclear distinction between the terms ‘lesson planning’ and ‘materials writing’ in the minds of trainee or newly-qualified teachers.

Whereas materials writing may be a fundamental aspect of a course book author’s job description, for the language teacher, surely training should focus more on how to find, select, adapt, combine and exploit materials rather than create them from scratch.