Way back in October last year, there was an #AusELT Twitter chat on ‘Integrating Australian content into courses’. You can read the summary here, but one theme that emerged strongly was the lack of easily available ELT material with an Australian focus. One reason is that Australian publications are simply much rarer than ‘global’ ones (ie, from the UK or US). Another is that, despite being surrounded by authentic Australian materials, putting together lesson plans and worksheets that use authentic material appropriately and effectively is difficult and time-consuming.

The net result is that we spend much more time doing grammar/skill ‘McNugget’ lessons (to borrow Scott Thornbury’s term), using the same coursebooks that students can find in their own country, than we do truly engaging the students with what language really is: an integral part of the surrounding culture and community.

As a result of the chat, we decided to create a community wiki, the #AusELT Resource Wiki, with two main aims:

• to help our learners better understand and engage with Australian culture, lifestyle, music, film, current events etc, whilst learning English in a way that is practical, relevant and interesting
• to help each other by sharing our favourite resources, ideas, lessons, worksheets and links in one place, so no one has to reinvent the wheel alone anymore.

So far we have pages, all with an Antipodean focus, on Culture and Lifestyle, Expressions and Idioms, Movies, News, Published Resources, Pronunciation, Songs , Television, and Websites and Blogs
…and we look forward to many more! Do you think something is missing? You can add it!

Now we have the framework, what we really need is more content. The URL of the wiki is http://auselt.pbworks.com. If you have any suggestions, problems or questions – or even better, some fantastic lesson plans 🙂 – please get involved and help make this the amazing AusELT community resource it has the potential to be.

Many thanks to Lesley Ciocarelli (@cioccas) in Canberra, Kristin Walters (@krisawal) in Melbourne and Paul Forster (@forstersensei) in Brisbane for helping put this together – a national effort!

This post by @sophiakhan4