Designing high quality activities for ESL students

When teaching, it's important that the materials you design not only solid have solid content, but they also need to be graphically designed in a way that facilitates understanding.  Here are some tips on how to create activities with excellent content and visual appeal:

Design

• Use SmartArt to create graphic organizers.  You can also use mindmapping or brainstorming sites like bubbl.us or mindmeister.com to do this as well.
• Leave plenty of white space.  This will help to reduce clutter and let the student see what's most important.
• Make the title is specific and easy to find.  This way a student doesn't spend valuable time trying to understand less important words.
• Use bold, italics, font sizes, etc. to help draw the eye to what’s most important on the page.
• Try to repeat the same design style for the repeating components (like directions).
• If you use graphics, make sure they support the text.

 Content

• Make sure the language AND tasks are written at a level accessible for the intended students.
• Vary the type of exercises you include.  Try to match the difficulty of task to the level of student.
• Make language as simple and straightforward as possible.
• Base your activity only on material the students have learned already.  Including new vocabularly or other unlearned information will only confuse students.